Question

I’m currently running into trouble when dealing with timestamps. I am debugging the following, exactly same code in Chrome 24.0.1312.56 m and Firefox 18.0.1 console:

new Date(parseInt('2012'), parseInt('09') - 1, parseInt('30')).getTime()/1000

When I execute it in Chrome I get:

1348956000

And when I execute it in Firefox I get:

1325199600

Question: What is the problem here?

Answer 1

For parseInt('09'):

• Chrome 24 seems to return 9
• FireFox 18 seems to treat the number as octal therefore returns 0 (the 0 is parsed but 9 is not)

Quote from parseInt documentation:

Although discouraged by ECMAScript 3, many implementations interpret a
numeric string beginning with a leading 0 as octal.
[…]
The ECMAScript 5 specification of the function parseInt no longer
allows implementations to treat Strings beginning with a 0 character
as octal values.
[…]
Since many implementations have not adopted this behavior as of 2011,
and because older browsers must be supported, always specify a radix.

Solution: revise your code and explicitly specify the radix parameter:

new Date(parseInt('2012', 10), parseInt('09', 10) - 1, parseInt('30', 10)).getTime()/1000
// 1348945200