JS gets date in UTC

Question

I created the date in JS like this:

var myDate = new Date('2013-01-01 00:00:00'); 

I guess JS reads this as UTC time. But when I do something like myDate.getTime (), the returned timestamp was something like the time at 4:00 GMT.

Why is this? And how do I get a date like midnight in UTC?

Answer 1

At least in Chrome, this works:

var myDate = new Date('2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC');

It also works if you put GMT instead of UTC . But I don't know if this is a cross browser enough.

Answer 2

I live in India. So my time zone is Indian Standard Time (IST), which is listed in the tz database as Asia/Kolkata . India - 5 hours 30 minutes more than Greenwich. Therefore, when I execute new Date("2013-01-01 00:00:00") , the actual time in GMT is "2012-12-31 18:30:00" .

I believe that you live in America because you are in the EST time zone (GMT-04: 00)? I'm right?

If you want to analyze time in GMT instead of your local time zone, do the following:

 new Date("2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00"); 

Note the capital T between date and time and +00:00 at the end. This is the format used to parse a specific time in a specific time zone.

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Given the date string "2013-01-01 00:00:00" you can convert it to the required format using the following function:

 function formatDateString(string, timezone) { return string.replace(" ", "T") + timezone; } 

Then you can create the date as follows:

 new Date(formatDateString("2013-01-01 00:00:00", "+00:00")); 

Another way to convert local time to GMT:

 var timezone = new Date("1970-01-01 00:00:00"); // this is the start of unix time 

Now that you have your own time zone as a date object, you can do:

 new Date(new Date("2013-01-01 00:00:00") - timezone); 

All of the above methods return the same date in GMT.

Answer 3

JS reads this with the time zone that your computer uses.

You can try using myDate.toUTCString() to get the date in UTC.

If you want to use the timestamp myDate.getTime()

Answer 4

Mine works just by doing it

 var datetime= new Date() 

However, the month is 1, so you need to add one