get day of week from returned date from server

Question

I'm retrieving a timestamp from a server as follows:

2016-03-08 15:30

I have an array to pass in to get the day of the week:

var dayNameArray = {
"0": "Sun",
"1": "Mon",
"2": "Tue",
"3": "Wed",
"4": "Thu",
"5": "Fri",
"6": "Sat"
}

How would I get this to say what the day of the week is? Thanks!

Answer 1

Construct Date from string and use getDay method to get day number:

var myDate = new Date("2016-03-08 15:30");
var dayNum = myDate.getDay();

var dayNameArray = {
  "0": "Sun",
  "1": "Mon",
  "2": "Tue",
  "3": "Wed",
  "4": "Thu",
  "5": "Fri",
  "6": "Sat"
}
console.log(dayNameArray[dayNum]);

Answer 2

A short version:

var date = new Date('2016-03-08 15:30'.replace(/\-/g, '/'));
var day = 'Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat'.split(' ')[date.getDay()];

console.log(day);

The current construction uses the split method, which is shorter than the regular array:

'Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat'.split(' ')
['Sun','Mon','Tue','Wed','Thu','Fri','Sat']

My suggestion is to replace all - with / for compatibility with more browsers. For more details please see "Why new Date() is always return null?" question and answers.