Question

I have an ajax call, which returns datetime. Javascript displays it using client timezone. I not need in any client timezone, I want to show datetime the same as server return. Is it possible?

I get date via:

var d = eval('new' + date.replace(/\//g, ' '));

Answer 1

First off, there’s no reason to use eval here (or almost anywhere), and generally lots of reasons not to.

JavaScript has only “local” time (the timezone of the client) and UTC (universal coordinated time, effectively the same as GMT). So your best bet normally is to have the server send you the time in UTC. But in your case, since you want to display the date in the server’s timezone, it doesn’t really matter whether JavaScript thinks the date is in local time or server time, and it’s fine to send it in the server’s timezone.

Note that when parsing date strings, JavaScript only recently (as of ECMAScript5) got a standard format for date strings, which is a simplified version of ISO-8601. Details here. Note that some older browsers will not yet support that format.

It’s impossible to offer much more guidance without an example of what you’re trying to parse.

Diodeus’ suggestion also seems to me to make a lot of sense: If you want the date to be displayed in the server’s timezone and format, just display the string you’re given without interpreting it (again, subject to what the string looks like; I can’t immediately come up with a reasonable format that would work with your posted code).