Question

I’m being passed a date that is ‘date time UTC’ such as 2012-03-10 20:00:00 UTC. How can I parse that using Javascript’s Date so that I can get the time until now?

Answer 1

Date.parse can do it:

new Date(Date.parse('2012-03-10 20:00:00 UTC'))

At least, it can on Google Chrome. If you find any compatibility problems, this will do the trick instead:

function parseDate(date) {
    var m = /^(\d{4})-(\d\d)-(\d\d) (\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d) UTC$/.exec(date);
    var tzOffset = new Date(+m[1], +m[2] - 1, +m[3], +m[4], +m[5], +m[6]).getTimezoneOffset();

    return new Date(+m[1], +m[2] - 1, +m[3], +m[4], +m[5] - tzOffset, +m[6]);
}