jQuery UI datepicker to epoch

Question

What is the best way to get a datepicker date in the following format yyyy-dd-mm (yy-dd-mm in datepicker settings) and convert it into epoch time with Javascript?

I was trying to do it like this:

var aDate = $("#date").val().split('-');
var epoch = new Date(aDate[0] + "," + aDate[1] + "," + aDate[2]).getTime() / 1000;

And a console.log(epoch) comes back as NaN.

But if I declare epoch as new Date(2011,10,30).getTime() / 1000; then there is no problems. I am guessing the problem is that I am passing in a string, but I have no clue how to solve it as I am new to Javascript.

Edit: I know about the altDate and altFormat settings in datepicker. But I want to know how to do it without using those setting. Because I will have to do what I am describing above for date + time later.

Answer 1

Try changing your date constructor to this:

var epoch = new Date(aDate[0], aDate[1] - 1, aDate[2]).getTime() / 1000;

We've removed the string concatenation, so it should read the date correctly. Month is represented as aDate[1] - 1 because month numbers in JavaScript are zero based (January = 0, December = 11), so 1 needs to be subtracted from the month number.

You can find a working example here: http://jsfiddle.net/Qpg24/67/

Answer 2

jQuery UI datepicker's altDate and altFormat parameters will do this for you automatically.

Check out the "Populate alternate field" example in the examples.

Answer 3

jQuery UI datepicker has a 'getDate' method that returns the date as a string:

Sun Apr 28 2013 13:30:00 GMT+1000 (EST)

You can use the 'getTime' method of a Date object to convert this string into milliseconds since the epoch. Using your example code, this would look like:

var epoch = new Date( $("#date").datepicker( "getDate" ) ).getTime();

This works for jQuery datetimepicker as well (http://trentrichardson.com/examples/timepicker/)