Is there any way to define a javascript date object with AM/PM value?

Something like this

var startDate = new Date("1900-1-1 8:20:00 PM");

Is there any way to define a javascript date object with AM/PM value?

Something like this

var startDate = new Date("1900-1-1 8:20:00 PM");

• javascript
• date

• @pablochan I get "invalid date"... – Šime Vidas Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 12:28
• @pablochan Nope, it doesn't return me proper value when I try to call startDate.getHours(), it returns NaN, while when I define date like this var startTime = new Date(1900,1,1,8,20,0); call to getHours() properly returns 8 :( – Pawan Nogariya Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 12:34
• @Bakudan-ханювиги—no, it will not. Date.parse is very browser dependent. To reliably convert a string to a date object, it must be parsed manually. – RobG Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 12:37
• @PawanNogariya A 8PM time should return 20, not 8. – Šime Vidas Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 12:37
• @PawanNogariya: It works in Chrome but apparently not everywhere. Check my answer. – pablochan Commented Dec 24, 2011 at 12:37

4 Answers 4

This works:

new Date( '1 Jan 1900 8:20:00 PM' )

and is equivalent to

new Date( '1 Jan 1900 20:20:00' )

Live demo: http://jsfiddle.net/cVE2E/

you can use Date.parse

var startDate = new Date(Date.parse("1900-1-1 8:20:00 PM"));

This depends on the browser and/or the locale. But I found a script that can help: http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/date-time-format

There is no guarantee that the Date.parse() method, and hence the new Date() constructor can parse any specific date format. By the ECMAScript standard, only a specific ISO 8601 format and some implementation-dependent formats need to be processed.

Thus, for portability at least, you need to use other tools, such as the Globalize.js library; using it, you would use

Globalize.parseDate('1900-1-1 8:20:00 PM','yyyy-M-d h:mm:ss tt')

which returns a Date object when the first argument matches the format specified by the second argument.

If you need to process alternative date formats on input, you may need to write code that tries reading the data using specific formats until it gets a non-null result.