Match the dates in jQuery with different formats

Question

I have div in which I am providing date and time like this

<div class="timing">
   <div id="count-down" data-date="2016-08-31 14:21:00"> </div>
</div>

How would I match or compare with current date, because I am getting current date in this format Wed Aug 31 2016 14:34:58 GMT+0500 (Pakistan Standard Time)

I want to redirect a page to new location if current date is greater than provided date

var currentDate = new Date();
var providedDate = $('#count-down').attr('data-date')

if (currentDate.getDate().toString > providedDate)
{
    window.location.href = 'Promo';
    $('.timing').css("display", "none");
    $('.website-loading').css("display", "block");
}

See : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3552461/how-to-format-a-javascript-date/39203226#39203226 — Vijay Maheriya, Aug 31 '16 at 09:38
The best way is to convert the strings to Date objects and compare those. Use a library (e.g. [*moment.js*](http://momentjs.com), [*fecha.js*](https://github.com/taylorhakes/fecha)), do not rely on the Date constructor or Date.parse. E.g. `if (fecha.parse(dateString, 'ddd MMM D YYYY h:mm:ss ZZ') > new Date()) /*date is after now*/`. — RobG, Aug 31 '16 at 23:12

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 01 '16 at 00:46

I have div in which I am providing date and time like this
<div id="count-down" data-date="2016-08-31 14:21:00"> </div>

The string in the data- attribute is not consistent with the format specified in ECMA-262 (the "T" separator between the date and time is missing), so you should manually parse it by either writing a parsing function or use a library and provide the format to parse.

If you use the Date constructor (or Date.parse, they are equivalent for parsing) to parse the string, you may get an invalid date (e.g. in Safari, new Date('2016-01-01 12:00:00') produces an invalid date) since parsing of non–standard strings is entirely implementation dependent.

There are many suitable libraries, some suggestions:

moment.js does parsing, formatting, timezones and arithmetic and has a CDN
fecha.js just does parsing and formatting is very much smaller than moment.js

When you create a Date object, it only has one internal value (called its time value), which is milliseconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z (the javascript epoch, which is the same as the UNIX epoch). When you call the toString method, the result is an implementation dependent string that differs between implementations (in your case you see something like "Wed Aug 31 2016 14:34:58 GMT+0500 (Pakistan Standard Time)", a different implementation may produce something else.

How would I match or compare with current date, because I am getting current date in this format Wed Aug 31 2016 14:34:58 GMT+0500 (Pakistan Standard Time)

When comparing dates, you really just want to compare the time value. If you compare using the relational operators > or <, they will coerce the dates to their time value so you can compare the dates directly, e.g.:

var providedDate = fecha.parse($('#count-down').attr('data-date'), 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss');

if (Date.now() > providedDate) {
  // providedDate is in the past
}

Note that since no time zone information is provided in the string to parse, it's treated as a "local" date and time and the host system's current settings are used to determine the offset from UTC, which is then used when calculating the time value. The same system works in reverse when generating a local date and time string from the Date using the default toString method.

Also:

currentDate.getDate()

just returns the date (i.e. the day in the month) as a number without the year and month.

Match the dates in jQuery with different formats

1 Answers1