getFullYear returns year before on first day of year

Question

I'm trying to pull just the year out of a date, but for some reason on the first day of the year its returning the year previous.

new Date('2012-01-01').getFullYear()

will return '2011' and

new Date('2012-01-02').getFullYear()

will return '2012'

Any good ideas on what I'm doing wrong? or a fix for this would be helpful.

Answer 1

new Date('2012-01-01') will parse the date assuming it's in UTC. The created Date object incorporates your timezone, so it will take that into account when printing out the result of getYear(). If you're in GMT-anything, that means you're going back to the previous year. You can ignore timezones and deal with just UTC by calling Date.prototype.getUTCFullYear().