Question

I have this string given to me by youtube rss data and I can grab it and store it, but I dont know how to manipulate the string into something that I am trying to use it for.

2012-08-08T16:49:52.000Z

I want to use the string above and create a jquery function that will parse it and spit out how long ago the video was uploaded. ex: 1 day ago, 15 days ago, 20 days ago. I dont expect the parsing to be too much work, but if the logic behind figuring out how many days ago a video was uploaded is very hard, then I will just display the upload date as month day. ex: Aug 8

In short:

• I need to grab the date before the T character in the provided string
• Then display it as 3 days ago format or month day format

I do not know how to do either of these. Hopefully someone can help me. 🙂

UPDATE: So I have grabbed and seperated the date from the rest of the upload information thanks to a comment in this post.

var uploadDate = x.substring(0, x.indexOf('T'));

giving me 2012-08-08

UPDATE 2: I have parsed out the month and day with split()

var date = uploadDate.split('-');
var month = date[1];
var day = date[2];

MY CODE after the ANSWER was given

function differenceDate(dateStr) {
    var dateString = dateStr.split('T')[0];
    var date = dateString.split('-');
    var firstDate = new Date(parseInt(date[0],10), parseInt(date[1],10)-1, parseInt(date[2],10));
    var secondDate = new Date();
    var diffDate = secondDate.getTime() - firstDate.getTime();
    var converted = diffDate/1000/60/60/24;

    var uploaded;
    if(converted < 1){
        uploaded = 'few hours ago';
    } else if(converted>1 && converted<2){
        uploaded = '1 day ago';
    } else if(converted>2){
        var daysAgo = Math.floor(converted);
        uploaded = daysAgo+ ' days ago';
    }

    return uploaded;
}
var daysAgo = differenceDate( '2012-08-08T16:49:52.000Z' );

Answer 1

Since you can grab the date string, i assume you can split it from ‘T’ char and send index 0 of result array to your favorite date difference function 🙂 i.e.

function millisBetween(dateStr) {

    var dateArray = dateStr.split("-");

    // new Date(year, month, day)
    var firstDate = new Date(parseInt(dateArray[0],10), parseInt(dateArray[1],10) - 1, parseInt(dateArray[2],10));

     // today
    var secondDate = new Date();

    var millisBetween = secondDate.getTime() - firstDate.getTime();

    return millisBetween;
}

var strDatePart = "2012-08-08T16:49:52.000Z".split("T")[0];
var millis = millisBetween(strDatePart); // date difference in milliseconds

After this, all you have to do is check the millis variable and find out if the video was uploaded just minutes ago, some hours ago or maybe years ago.