Question

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:31:11 GMT

If I have that date object, how do I turn that into a unix timestamp (seconds since epoch)?

Answer 1

You could use

var dateString = "Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:31:11 GMT";
var mSecondsSinceEpoch = Date(dateString).getTime(); 

which returns the UNIX Epoch time in milliseconds. You can leave ‘dateString’ empty to take the current time. However, when a Date object is cast to a number, it will also return the above. Thus

var mSecondsSinceEpoch = +Date(dateString) // milliseconds

or

var secondsSinceEpoch = (Date(dateString) / 1000) // seconds

also works! See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date for more information on the Javascript Date object.