Question

I have a system that returns a JSON object that contains dates in string format.

These dates are in the format “2012-10-19 06:05:38 GMT” (no… I’m stuck with them like this)

So I need to get this into a date object (d) ready to output as d.toLocaleDateString()

In chrome it works perfectly by just passing the string to a new Date (Bad bad Chrome – makes Eric lazy), but of course it fails in FF and IE

I can fix it by splitting the string but its not pretty and I’ve not figured out dealing with the offsets from GMT.

There must be a more elegant way…?

I’m sure someone here can do it in one line.

Answer 1

It’s not quite a one-liner, but if you know all your dates will be GMT, something like the following should work:

function parseDate(dateString) {
    // [y, m, d, hr, min, sec]
    var parts = dateString.match(/\d+/g);

    // Months are 0-indexed
    parts[1] -= 1;

    return new Date(Date.UTC.apply(Date, parts));
}