Error, not defined message

Question

I am parsing an XML file for data to display in my Google maps. That all works great. I have one element from the XML I have parsed called "expires", which is the date from XML file in ISO 8601. I have this code to format the date which works great when I enter a raw static ISO 8601 formatted date and output it to my infoboxes via dstring.

This works great for formatting, but shows expires is not defined error.

    function dateFromString(expires) {

  var bits = expires.split(/[-T:+]/g);
  var d = new Date(bits[0], bits[1]-1, bits[2]);
  d.setHours(bits[3], bits[4], bits[5]);

  // Get supplied time zone offset in minutes
  var offsetMinutes = bits[6] * 60 + Number(bits[7]);
  var sign = /\d\d-\d\d:\d\d$/.test(expires)? '-' : '+';

  // Apply the sign
  offsetMinutes = 0 + (sign == '-'? -1 * offsetMinutes : offsetMinutes);

  // Apply offset and local timezone
  d.setMinutes(d.getMinutes() - offsetMinutes - d.getTimezoneOffset())

  // d is now a local time equivalent to the supplied time
return d;

} 

var days = ["Sun","Mon","Tues","Wed","Thur","Fri","Sat"];
var months =['Jan','Feb','March','April','May','June','July','Aug','Sept','Oct','Nov','Dec'];
var ampm = " am";

var dt = (dateFromString(expires));
var yr = dt.getFullYear();
var mth = dt.getMonth();  // months in Javascript are 0-11 so May is month 4
mth = months[mth];
var dte = dt.getDate();
var dy = dt.getDay();  // days are 0-6
dy = days[dy];
var hrs = dt.getHours();
var h1 = hrs;
var mins = dt.getMinutes();

if (hrs >= 12) {ampm = " pm"}
if (hrs >= 13) {hrs = hrs - 12}
if (h1 == 0) {hrs = 12}

if (hrs <10) {hrs = "0" + hrs};  // if  leading zero desired
if (mins <10) {mins = "0" + mins};

var dtstring = dy + ", " + mth + " " + dte + ", " + yr + " at " + hrs + ":" + mins + ampm;

Now when I manually input and ISO 8601 format like so...

var dt = (dateFromString('2013-05-02T11:08:00-6:00'));

It formats it correctly with the output var dtstring, so I know it works. But it shows the current date for all my output data naturally so I have manually inputted a datestamp instead of defining the var from the parsed XML of expires. I need it to format the expires variable I parsed from the XML file.

Here is where I am stuck...

I am not fluent in Javascript and I have gotten this far with research, When I go to define expires with the code above I am getting a expires not define but it clearly appears to be defined. I can define it directly to my infoboxes and it's fine but not when I define it to be formatted.

What am I missing or doing wrong?

CODE EXAMPLE

Answer 1

Here is an example of formatting your date to ISO 8601

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date#Example.3A_ISO_8601_formatted_dates

There are several approaches you can use to format the date/time, below is a blog on such examples.

http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/date-time-format

It's hard to understand what you want to do from your wording but maybe this will help you to get a little further along.

Good luck.