Question

Why doesn’t Chrome specify AM or PM when displaying a date by using date.toLocaleString() ? The string I get is Fri Jun 25 2010 11:21:09 GMT+1000. While IE returns almost the same string but with AM after the time.

Is there any method on the Date object I can call to check whether it’s AM or PM and, more importantly, check whether user’s locale is using 12-hour cycles or 24-hours?

Update. Found this bug http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=135. It is very old, I was hoping there would be updates on it.

Answer 1

getHours returns a value between 0 and 23, so you can easily determine whether it’s before or after noon.

However, I don’t know any method to get a kind of universal locale string. It’s completely up to the browser:

The contents of the String are
implementation-dependent, but are
intended to represent the Date in the
current time zone in a convenient,
human-readable form that corresponds
to the conventions of the host
environment’s current locale.
– ECMAScript 5, § 15.9.5.5

Instead, you can more or less test the user’s language setting and build a string yourself.