Question

I’m retrieving data from a JSON feed using jQuery and as part of the feed I’m getting ‘datetime’ attributes like “2009-07-01 07:30:09”. I want to put this information into a javascript Date object for easy use but I don’t believe the Date object would recognize this kind of format if I simply plugged it into the constructor. Is there a function or maybe a clever trick I can use to quickly break down this format into something the Date object can recognize and use?

Answer 1

The “date” attribute you are retrieving from that webservice is not a real Date, as it is not a recognized date format.

The easiest way to handle it as a Date object would be to replace the empty space with a “T”:

var receivedDate = "2009-07-01 07:30:09";
var serializedDate = new Date(receivedDate.replace(" ", "T"));
alert(serializedDate);

This is not the most correct, as it is not handling timezones, but in most cases will work.