Javascript: How to convert exif date time data to timestamp? [duplicate]

Question

In javascript, while using exif-js to extract metadata of an image file, I am getting date time format as 2017:03:09 14:49:21.

The value in the DateTimeOriginal property is formatted as YYYY:MMY:DD HH:MM:SS. When I use var d = new Date(2017:03:09 14:49:21), it returns NaN. It's the colons in between the YYYY, MM, and DD which causes problem.

How to solve this problem?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Don't use the built-in parser (i.e. Date constructor or Date.parse) for parsing strings as it's largely implementation dependent and unreliable. If you can trust the date to be valid, then the following will do:

/* Parse date string in YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss format
** separator can be any non-digit character
** e.g. 2017:03:09 14:49:21
*/
function parseDate(s) {
  var b = s.split(/\D/);
  return new Date(b[0],b[1]-1,b[2],b[3],b[4],b[5]);
}

console.log(parseDate('2017:03:09 14:49:21').toString());

It's fairly easy to add validation to the values. Otherwise, use a library and make sure you specify the format to parse.

Answer 2

My recommendation would be to use Moment (http://momentjs.com/docs/), as it provides clean parsing of dates. With Moment, what you want is this:

var tstamp = moment("2017:03:09 14:49:21", "YYYY:MM:DD HH:mm:ss");
var date = tstamp.toDate();