Question

I receive a date time as a string from the server that might look like this:

07/08/2012 13:17:32

This is a UTC time.

Or it might have timezone in format:

07/08/2012 13:17:32 UTC+01:00

I need a general way to parse this into a Date object for display. If I do a var d = new Date(str) then the first example it assumes is a local time.

Edit:
It might not always be ‘UTC’ in the string, I think it could be GMT, or Z, or any other timezone signifier.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If your timezone is always in format UTC+nn, and strings with explicit UTC TZ are parsed correctly, as I assume from your question, then simple

if (date_string.search(/a-z/i) == -1) {
 date_string += 'UTC+00:00'
}

will do.