javascript date object changes - javascript

I have been reading up on dates for days, seemingly going in circles here. I have a string in a DB that looks like this
2012,03,13,01,31,38
I want to create a js date object from it so...
new Date(2012,03,13,01,31,38);
Easy enough, right? But it comes back as
2012-04-13 05:31:38 +0000
So the month is off by 1 and the time is off by 4 hours (maybe DST or Timezone related???). I simply want a date that matches the one I provided. Its driving me nuts, dealing with these JS date objects.
How can I be sure the date object is the exact same date and time as the string suggests, I have no need for Timezone or DST changes, simply a date that matches a string.
More specifics regarding application:
My application for this need is for an iphone app I am developing in Titanium (which builds using JS). Basically, part of my app involves logging data and with that log I collect the device's current date and time. I save all of this information to a mySQL database. The field in the database looks like this format: "2012-02-16 00:12:32"
Here is where I start to run into problems. I am now offering the ability to edit the log, including the date and time it was logged. In order to use an iPhone "picker", I must convert the string above into a JS date object again. This usually screws things up for me. I essentially need to create a new date object with the date above, with timezone and dst being completely irrelevant, so that when I save back to the DB, its just the string above, modified as per the users request. It needs to not matter whether they are editing in pennsylvania or china, they are editing the same log date.
Sorry if this has been confusing. I am having a hard time figuring out this whole date stuff.

This depends on what your string is. If that string is UTC time, you need to parse it as that. If it's local time, you need to parse it as local time. You can make a helper method like this for that part:
function getDate(utc, year, month, day, hour, minute, second) {
if(utc) {
var utc = Date.UTC(year, month - 1, day, hour, minute, second);
return new Date(utc);
} else {
return new Date(year, month - 1, day, hour, minute, second);
}
}
Now, to parse your string, you can use this:
function fromString(utc, str) {
var parts = str.split(',');
var year = parts[0];
var month = parts[1];
var day = parts[2];
var hour = parts[3];
var minute = parts[4];
var second = parts[5];
return getDate(utc, year, month, day, hour, minute, second);
}
which you can use like this for your example:
var d = fromString(true, '2012,02,13,00,31,38'); // If UTC
var d = fromString(false, '2012,02,13,00,31,38'); // If local time
Here's a working jsFiddle that you can play with:
http://jsfiddle.net/rNqXW/
which also shows two ways to print the date (UTC or local). Hope this helps.

I had the same problem. There are two reasons for the weird time change:
Use new Date(Date.UTC(2012,03,13,01,31,38)) to avoid the time change.
Note that the month is zero based! Months go from 0 to 11 for this function.

Related

Merging two Timezone aware date objects in javascript- one for date, the other for time

Lets say I have the following timezone aware Date objects in Javascript:
var date1 = new Date("2019-07-02T07:30:00-05:00");
var date2 = new Date("2020-08-05T00:00:00-05:00");
What is the best way to merge these two, such that I keep the time from date1 and the date from date2, yielding:
new Date("2020-08-05T07:30:00-05:00");
I've tried:
date1.setDate(date2.getDate());
date1.setMonth(date2.getMonth());
date1.setYear(date2.getYear());
which set the day and month correctly for date1, but the year is incorrectly set to "120" with the example inputs above.
A few things:
Date objects cannot be time zone aware. When passed a string with a time zone offset like the ones you showed here, they use that offset to determine the equivalent UTC time. Ultimately the only thing stored within the Date object is the numeric Unix timestamp that corresponds to that UTC time. You can see this with .getTime() or .valueOf().
getDay/setDay are for the day of the week, Saturday (0) through Sunday (6). Use getDate/setDate for the day of the month.
getYear/setYear are for two-digit years (or rather the current year minus 1900), and should not be used ever. Use getFullYear/SetFullYear instead.
Because of the first point, what you ask is not possible. Or at least, not possible with the full range of values that might be encountered in such strings. Instead, you can manipulate the strings directly, or you can use a library such as Luxon or Moment.
I'd also think a bit harder about what you're actually trying to accomplish. Where do these two values come from? Why are portions of the data important and others to be discarded? What will you do if the offsets are different between the two values? Only you can answer these points.
Manipulate the ISO strings directly:
const date1 = new Date("2019-07-02T07:30:00-05:00");
const date2 = new Date("2020-08-05T00:00:00-05:00");
const date3 = new Date([
date2.toISOString().split('T')[0],
'T',
date1.toISOString().split('T')[1],
].join(''));
console.log({date1, date2, date3});
By the way, there is no "timezone-aware" date objects. Once Date(...) is fired, time is UTC. getTimezoneOffset gets the difference from the local timezone to UTC.

Set date() to midnight in users timezone with moment.js

I use moment.js to display a UTC date in the users local timezone:
var date = new Date(Date.UTC(2016,03,30,0,0,0));
var now = new Date();
var diff = (date.getTime()/1000) - (now.getTime()/1000);
var textnode = document.createTextNode(moment(date).format('dddd, DD.MM.YYYY') + ' a las ' + moment(date).format('HH:mm A'));
document.getElementsByClassName("date")[0].appendChild(textnode.cloneNode(true));
I later use the diff variable to show a countdown timer.
I would like to show a different countdown timer to everyone in their local time zone. (Using the difference till its midnight in their time zone, not in UTC)
But I am struggeling to get it work. Instead of using var date = new Date(Date.UTC(2016,03,30,0,0,0)); I probably need to use some function of moment.js that gives me till midnight in the users time zone.
The best example would be new years eve. If I use UTC everyone would have the same counter (9 hours left) but in different parts of the world this wouldn't make sense. For someone in australia it should be 2 hours left, and for someone in the US 14 hours.
I'm not sure that I fully understand your question, but I'll give you some general advice and tips.
When using moment.js, there is very little need to ever use the Date object. Only use it for interacting with other APIs that expect a Date object.
To get a moment in UTC, just use moment.utc(...), passing the appropriate arguments, such as moment.utc([2016,3,30]) or moment.utc('2016-04-30') for midnight April 30th UTC.
If you want to convert that back to the user's local time, use the .local() function. For example, moment.utc('2016-04-30').local() will create a moment with the equivalent local time to the UTC time provided.
If you want a moment in the user's local time, then that would be moment(...), such as moment([2016,3,30]) or moment('2016-04-30') for midnight April 30th local time.
You can difference two moments using the diff function, which can give the answer in specific units, such as m1.diff(m2, 'seconds') where m1 and m2 are moment objects.
You don't need to call format twice. Just encapsulate any text you want outputed with square brackets. .format('dddd, DD.MM.YYYY [a las] HH:mm A')
You might look into moment's locale support. If I'm not mistaken, "a las" indicates Spanish, however it's not always "a las", but sometimes "a la", if the hour is 1. Also, moment only uses those words in its .calendar() function, such as when producing a phrase like "mañana a las 13:17". A regular date formatted with .format('LLLL') in the Spanish locale would be something like: "sábado, 19 de marzo de 2016 13:17". So, you might want to verify that "a las" is exactly what you want in every case.
The title to this question was how to set a date to midnight. For that, I recommend using moment's startOf function. m.startOf('day') will give set the moment m to the start of the day, which is usually midnight. Keep in mind that not every local day actually starts at midnight in every time zone. Due to anomalies like daylight saving time, some days might start at 1:00. For example, this occurs in Brazil on October 16th this year.
Also, if you created the moment in UTC mode, you may wish to convert it back to local mode first before setting it to the start of the day. If you don't want to change the original moment object, be sure to clone it first.
Putting this all together:
var m1 = moment.utc([2016,3,30]);
var m2 = m1.clone().local().startOf('day');
var now = moment();
var diff = m1.diff(now, 'seconds');

How to read the correct time/duration values from Google Spreadsheet

I'm trying to get from a time formatted Cell (hh:mm:ss) the hour value, the values can be bigger 24:00:00 for example 20000:00:00 should give 20000:
Table:
if your read the Value of E1:
var total = sheet.getRange("E1").getValue();
Logger.log(total);
The result is:
Sat Apr 12 07:09:21 GMT+00:09 1902
Now I've tried to convert it to a Date object and get the Unix time stamp of it:
var date = new Date(total);
var milsec = date.getTime();
Logger.log(Utilities.formatString("%11.6f",milsec));
var hours = milsec / 1000 / 60 / 60;
Logger.log(hours)
1374127872020.000000
381702.1866722222
The question is how to get the correct value of 20000 ?
Expanding on what Serge did, I wrote some functions that should be a bit easier to read and take into account timezone differences between the spreadsheet and the script.
function getValueAsSeconds(range) {
var value = range.getValue();
// Get the date value in the spreadsheet's timezone.
var spreadsheetTimezone = range.getSheet().getParent().getSpreadsheetTimeZone();
var dateString = Utilities.formatDate(value, spreadsheetTimezone,
'EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss');
var date = new Date(dateString);
// Initialize the date of the epoch.
var epoch = new Date('Dec 30, 1899 00:00:00');
// Calculate the number of milliseconds between the epoch and the value.
var diff = date.getTime() - epoch.getTime();
// Convert the milliseconds to seconds and return.
return Math.round(diff / 1000);
}
function getValueAsMinutes(range) {
return getValueAsSeconds(range) / 60;
}
function getValueAsHours(range) {
return getValueAsMinutes(range) / 60;
}
You can use these functions like so:
var range = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet().getRange('A1');
Logger.log(getValueAsHours(range));
Needless to say, this is a lot of work to get the number of hours from a range. Please star Issue 402 which is a feature request to have the ability to get the literal string value from a cell.
There are two new functions getDisplayValue() and getDisplayValues() that returns the datetime or anything exactly the way it looks to you on a Spreadsheet. Check out the documentation here
The value you see (Sat Apr 12 07:09:21 GMT+00:09 1902) is the equivalent date in Javascript standard time that is 20000 hours later than ref date.
you should simply remove the spreadsheet reference value from your result to get what you want.
This code does the trick :
function getHours(){
var sh = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var cellValue = sh.getRange('E1').getValue();
var eqDate = new Date(cellValue);// this is the date object corresponding to your cell value in JS standard
Logger.log('Cell Date in JS format '+eqDate)
Logger.log('ref date in JS '+new Date(0,0,0,0,0,0));
var testOnZero = eqDate.getTime();Logger.log('Use this with a cell value = 0 to check the value to use in the next line of code '+testOnZero);
var hours = (eqDate.getTime()+ 2.2091616E12 )/3600000 ; // getTime retrieves the value in milliseconds, 2.2091616E12 is the difference between javascript ref and spreadsheet ref.
Logger.log('Value in hours with offset correction : '+hours); // show result in hours (obtained by dividing by 3600000)
}
note : this code gets only hours , if your going to have minutes and/or seconds then it should be developped to handle that too... let us know if you need it.
EDIT : a word of explanation...
Spreadsheets use a reference date of 12/30/1899 while Javascript is using 01/01/1970, that means there is a difference of 25568 days between both references. All this assuming we use the same time zone in both systems. When we convert a date value in a spreadsheet to a javascript date object the GAS engine automatically adds the difference to keep consistency between dates.
In this case we don't want to know the real date of something but rather an absolute hours value, ie a "duration", so we need to remove the 25568 day offset. This is done using the getTime() method that returns milliseconds counted from the JS reference date, the only thing we have to know is the value in milliseconds of the spreadsheet reference date and substract this value from the actual date object. Then a bit of maths to get hours instead of milliseconds and we're done.
I know this seems a bit complicated and I'm not sure my attempt to explain will really clarify the question but it's always worth trying isn't it ?
Anyway the result is what we needed as long as (as stated in the comments) one adjust the offset value according to the time zone settings of the spreadsheet. It would of course be possible to let the script handle that automatically but it would have make the script more complex, not sure it's really necessary.
For simple spreadsheets you may be able to change your spreadsheet timezone to GMT without daylight saving and use this short conversion function:
function durationToSeconds(value) {
var timezoneName = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getSpreadsheetTimeZone();
if (timezoneName != "Etc/GMT") {
throw new Error("Timezone must be GMT to handle time durations, found " + timezoneName);
}
return (Number(value) + 2209161600000) / 1000;
}
Eric Koleda's answer is in many ways more general. I wrote this while trying to understand how it handles the corner cases with the spreadsheet timezone, browser timezone and the timezone changes in 1900 in Alaska and Stockholm.
Make a cell somewhere with a duration value of "00:00:00". This cell will be used as a reference. Could be a hidden cell, or a cell in a different sheet with config values. E.g. as below:
then write a function with two parameters - 1) value you want to process, and 2) reference value of "00:00:00". E.g.:
function gethours(val, ref) {
let dv = new Date(val)
let dr = new Date(ref)
return (dv.getTime() - dr.getTime())/(1000*60*60)
}
Since whatever Sheets are doing with the Duration type is exactly the same for both, we can now convert them to Dates and subtract, which gives correct value. In the code example above I used .getTime() which gives number of milliseconds since Jan 1, 1970, ... .
If we tried to compute what is exactly happening to the value, and make corrections, code gets too complicated.
One caveat: if the number of hours is very large say 200,000:00:00 there is substantial fractional value showing up since days/years are not exactly 24hrs/365days (? speculating here). Specifically, 200000:00:00 gives 200,000.16 as a result.

JavaScript Addition Date Functions

I don't really know too much about core JavaScript, just a dot of jQuery. But I know jQuery is not necessary for what I need here:
I want to use the getdate function to find out the server's day of the week. Then add a bunch of clauses like:
if its Monday add 6 to the date and return the date in MM/DD/YYYY form.
if its Tuesday add 5 to the date and return the date in MM/DD/YYYY form.
if its Wednesday add 4 to the date and return the date in MM/DD/YYYY form.
and so on until Sunday when it will add 0.
So lets say todays Monday, it will return 1/8/2012
And in real dates today's Sunday so it will really return 1/1/2012
Then I just want to call a document.write function to write the MM/DD/YYYY it returns into my HTML document.
Can anybody help me? I can clarify if you need me to...
getDay() returns the day of the week, Sunday = 0, Monday = 1, etc, etc.
So say today was Monday getDay() would return 1, which means daysToAdd would be 5.
Once we know how many days we want to add we can create a new date and add those days. We do this by getting today in milliseconds and then adding the number of days (daysToAdd) in milliseconds.
We convert days to milliseconds by multiplying by 24*60*60*1000 which is the number of milliseconds in a day.
I add 1 to the month because JavaScript returns 0 based month, but for display purposes we want to format it so that January for example is 1 not zero.
function getEndOfWeek() {
var today = new Date();
var weekDay = today.getDay();
// if you want the week to start on Monday instead of Sunday uncomment the code below
//weekDay -= 1;
//if(weekDay < 0) {
// weekDay += 7;
//}
var daysToAdd = 6 - weekDay;
var newDate = new Date(today.getTime() + daysToAdd *24*60*60*1000);
var month = newDate.getMonth() + 1;
var day = newDate.getDate();
var year = newDate.getFullYear();
var formatedDate = month + "/" + day + "/" + year;
return formatedDate;
}
You could implement in your code like so, JavaScript:
$(function() {
$("#TheDate").html(getEndOfWeek());
});
Your HTML would be something like this:
The week ends on <span id="TheDate"></span>.
You can find the jsFiddle here: jsFiddle
If you want to adjust the weekday so that you consider Monday the start of the week instead of Sunday you can do the following after you get the weekDay:
weekDay -= 1;
if(weekDay < 0) {
weekDay += 7;
}
var day = 1000*60*60*24
, nextSunday = new Date(+new Date() + day*(7-((0|(+new Date()/day)%7-3)||7)));
alert(
(101+nextSunday.getMonth()).toString().substr(1) + '/' +
(100+nextSunday.getDate()).toString().substr(1) + '/' +
nextSunday.getFullYear()
)
As fas as adding dates in JavaScipt my "DateExtensions" library does this well enough, I think. You can get it here:
http://depressedpress.com/javascript-extensions/dp_dateextensions/
Once refenced you can call "add()" as a method for any valid date and pass it any of many date parts (second, minutes, days, hours, etc). So assuming "curDate" is a valid JavaScript date object you can add 5 days like this:
newDate = curDate.add(5, "days");
Using a negative value will subtract:
newDate = curDate.add(-5, "days");
Once you get the date you want you can the use the library's dateFormat() method to display it like so:
curDate.dateFormat("MM/DD/YYYY");
There's full documentation at the link.
Integer Values for Day of Week
As for getting the integer value you want, it's actually easier that it looks (and you don't need an "if" just some math). The getDay() method of date returns the day of week with Sunday as "0" and Saturday as "6". So the week, from Sunday, would normally be:
0,1,2,3,4,5,6
First, you want to reverse that scale. That's easily done via subtraction by taking 7 (to total number of members of the set) from the value. This gives you this scale:
-7,-6,-5,-4,-3,-2,-1
We're getting closer. You want the first value to be zero as well. The simplest way (I think) to do this is to get the modulus (remainder) of the value by the total number of members. All this basically does is make "-7" a zero and leave the rest alone giving us this:
0,-6,-5,-4,-3,-2,-1
Almost done. Finally you don't want negative numbers so you need to use the Math.abs() method to eliminate the sign (get the absolute value) leaving us with our desired result:
0,6,5,4,3,2,1
For all the talk the acutual code is pretty compact:
Math.abs((cnt-7)%7)
Wrapping this into the original example gives us:
newDate = curDate.add(Math.abs((curDate.getDay()-7)%7), "days");
Server Vs Client
However take nnnnnn's comment to heart: in JavaScript the getDate() function gets the current date/time of the machine that it's running on - in the case of a web page that's the client, not the server.
If you actually meant the client time them you're set and done. If you really need the server time however that's annoying-to-impossible. If you own the server then it's actually not to hard to set up a rule that includes the current server in a cookie withing each fufilled request (you could then use my cookie library, also at the site above, to access the information!)
It's messier but depending on the server you might also be able to create an old-school server-side include that adds a bit of JavaScript to each page (preferably as a marked replace in the header) that hard-codes the date as a global variable.
You might also create a web service that returns the current server time but the client-overhead for that is insane compared to the data being delivered.
If the server's NOT yours (and you can't get the owner to provide the above) then the only real potential option is to do a straight http call and examine the HTTP "Date" header. Again however the overhead on this is immense compared to the return but it's really the only way. Any system like this would have to be very flexible however as any particular server might not return the date header or might not return it correctly.
Even if it does work understand that you might still not be getting the "server" time - or at least not the server you want. In a tiered architecture, for example an application server might render then page and hand it to a web server to return - you'd be getting the web server time, not the app server. Any number of appliances might also rewrite the headers (for example it's common to use dedicated SSL appliances to offload all the encryption work - these often re-write the headers themselves).
Sorry to get overly technical - JavaScript is definately one area where there's unfortunately rarely a "simple question". ;^)
Good Luck!

How to get difference of saved time and current time in jquery?

I want to get the time difference between saved time and current time in javascript or jquery. My saved time looks like Sun Oct 24 15:55:56 GMT+05:30 2010.
The date format code in java looks like
String newDate = "2010/10/24 15:55:56";
DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss");
Date date = format.parse(newDate);
How to compare it with the current time and get the difference?
Is there any inbuilt function in jquery or javascript??
Any suggestions or links would be appreciative!!!
Thanks in Advance!
Update
Date is stored as varchar in the DB. I am retriving it to a String variable and then change it to java.util.Date object. The java code looks like
String newDate = "2010/10/24 15:55:56";
DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss");
Date date = format.parse(newDate);
This date object was sent to client. There i want to compare the saved date with current date and want to show the time difference like 2 secs ago, 2 hours ago, 2 days ago etc... like exactly in facebook. I have gone through some date to timestamp conversion tutorial in java script and now i can get the difference in timestamp. Now, i want to know how i shall change it to some format like "2 secs or 2 days or 24 hours"??. Or, how i shall change it back to date format???
Convert them into timestamps which are actually integers and can get subtracted from each other. The you just have to convert back the resulting timestamp to a javascript date object.
var diff = new Date();
diff.setTime( time2.getTime()-time1.getTime() );
You dont need to explicit convert, just do this:
var timediff = new Date() - savedTime;
This will return the difference in milliseconds.
jQuery doesn't add anything for working with dates. I'd recommend using Datejs in the event that the standard JavaScript Date API isn't sufficient.
Perhaps you could clarify exactly what input and output you're aiming for. What do you mean by "the difference?" There is more than one way to express the difference between to instants in time (primarily units and output string formatting).
Edit: since you said you're working with jQuery, how about using CuteTime? (Demo page)

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