Question

I’m having the hardest time trying to convert this date from an API to UTC milliseconds. As of right now I’m displaying the dates but it’s showing 7 hours ahead and going on to the next day which I don’t even have data for. Here is the example format:

8/31/2012 9:00:00 AM

I currently have this code

var formattedDate = new Date(data[i].Time);
formattedDate = formattedDate.getTime();

which seems like it’s returning the correct value type but the date is wrong. I’ve also tried
getUTCMilliseconds() and returns 0.

EDIT: jsfiddle example : http://jsfiddle.net/b2NK6/

Answer 1

So you want the raw timestamp in UTC time, instead of local time?

Compare:

(new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 7, 31, 9, 0, 0, 0))).getTime(); /* month 7 is August */

with

(new Date(Date.parse("8/31/2012 9:00:00 AM"))).getTime();

When you parse the string (the second example) it applies your local timezone information when it creates the date object. If you are in timezone -0700, then the date that is created will actually correspond to 4:00pm UTC.

But if you create the date object by explicitly saying that you are specifying the UTC value, it will give you 9:00am UTC, which corresponds to 2:00am in timezone -0700.

Edited to give clearer and more correct code example.