Javascript New Date Changing Hour Value

I am receiving times in the an AJAX request and am converting them using the new Date() function. I receive 2013-06-18T12:00:15Z However, somehow I get the following after new Dat

Solution 1:

This is a time zone problem. You must be in the EDT timezone (GMT-0400). To correctly parse the date you should tell the parser in which timezone your date is correct.

For you parse your date like this : new Date('2013-06-18 12:00:15 GMT-0400')

"GMT-0400" means GMT time minus 4 hours

Or if you don't wish to reformat your string, you can use the date.getUTC* functions to get the time as you parsed it.

The full list is available at Mozilla's documentation.

Solution 2:

I agree with Vaim Caen's answer that this is a timezone issue, but not with parsing - the date is being parsed fine, but into your local timezone, while you're expecting it to be parsed into UTC date.

This answer shows how to convert from your current timezone to UTC - applying this to the TryIt demo gives:

var msec = Date.parse("2013-06-18T12:00:15Z");
// or: var msec = Date.parse("Tue Jun 18 2013 08:00:15 GMT-0400 (EDT)");var d = newDate(msec);
d.setTime( d.getTime() + d.getTimezoneOffset()*60*1000 );
document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = d;

Edit: If you all you're interested in is displaying the date (no further manipulations) then you can use:

d.toUTCString()

which will show the date in GMT (for me it actually shows "GMT" so most likely not of use!)

The alternative is to add a function to the prototype to show the date in whatever format you want and use the date.getUTC* methods.