javascript - Converting Date and Time To Unix Timestamp

Question

I'm displaying the date and time like this

24-Nov-2009 17:57:35

I'd like to convert it to a unix timestamp so I can manipulate it easily. I'd need to use regex to match each part of the string then work out the unix timestamp from that.

I'm awful with regex but I came up with this. Please suggest improvements ^.^

/((d){2}+)-((Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)+)-((d){4}+) ((d){2}+):((d){2}+):((d){2}+)/gi

How can I do this?

Answer 1

If you just need a good date-parsing function, I would look at date.js. It will take just about any date string you can throw at it, and return you a JavaScript Date object.

Once you have a Date object, you can call its getTime() method, which will give you milliseconds since January 1, 1970. Just divide that result by 1000 to get the unix timestamp value.

In code, just include date.js, then:

var unixtime = Date.parse("24-Nov-2009 17:57:35").getTime()/1000