Javascript equivalent of php's strtotime()?

Question

In PHP, you can easily convert an English textual datetime description into a proper date with strtotime().

Is there anything similar in Javascript?

Answer 1

There is not. The closest built-in option is Date.parse(), which parses a very limited subset of what strtotime() can:

var ts = Date.parse("2010-10-29"); 

It's worth noting that this function returns milliseconds instead of seconds, so you need to divide the result by 1000 to get an equivalent value to PHP's function.

Answer 2

I found this article and tried the tutorial. Basically, you can use the date constructor to parse a date, then write get the seconds from the getTime() method

var d=new Date("October 13, 1975 11:13:00"); document.write(d.getTime() + " milliseconds since 1970/01/01"); 

Does this work?