Question

I’m using AJAX to pull in an RSS feed and show a list of items. However the date that comes back is super long and needs to be shorter.

e.g. Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:53:35 PDT to become just 11 Jun 2012 17:53

Is it possible to do this with javascript?

The code looks like this currently:

for(var i = 0; i < feed.items.length && i < 5; i++) {

                            var item = feed.items[i];

                            html += '<li>'
                            + item.updated;

                            html += ' | <span class="title">'
                            + '<a href="'
                            + item.link
                            + '">'
                            + item.title
                            + '</a>'
                            + '</span></li>';

                        }

So I need to do something to that item.updated object.

I’ve done a quick search on parsing dates, but not found anything I can make use of.

Answer 1

You can use this RegEx:

var result = "Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:53:35 PDT".replace(
    /[A-Z][a-z]{2}, (\d+) ([A-Z][a-z]{2}) (\d+) (\d+):(\d+):\d+ [A-Z]{3}/,
    "$1 $2 $3 $4:$5"
); // result = "11 Jun 2012 17:53"

Or even simpler:

var result = "Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:53:35 PDT".replace(
    /[A-Z][a-z]{2}, (\d+ [A-Z][a-z]{2} \d+ \d+:\d+):\d+ [A-Z]{3}/,
    "$1"
); // result = "11 Jun 2012 17:53"

Even more simpler:

var result = "Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:53:35 PDT".match(
    /(\d+ [A-Z][a-z]{2} \d+ \d+:\d+)/
)[0]; // result = "11 Jun 2012 17:53"

But if you care about timezones, i.e. want to display the client’s timezone instead, you can do this:

var Result = new Date("Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:53:35 PDT").toString().match(
    /([A-Z][a-z]{2} \d+ \d+ \d+:\d+)/
)[0]; // result = "Jun 12 2012 08:53" // client's timezone, GMT+8 for example