Parsing ISO dates with Flex and ActionScript

14 Responses to Parsing ISO dates with Flex and ActionScript

1. David Bates says:

   February 19, 2008 at 7:20 am

   Thanks for the code – a real life saver!

   The only thing your function doesn’t deal with is the “null” ISO date: 0001-01-01T00:00:00. I would have expected this function to return a null Date object if it were passed this String.

   public static function parseIsoDate(dateStr:String):Date
   {
   	dateStr = dateStr.replace(/-/g, "/");
   	dateStr = dateStr.replace("T", " ");
   	dateStr = dateStr.replace("Z", " GMT-0000");
   	const i:Number = Date.parse(dateStr);
   
   	if (i < 0)
   	{
   		return null;
   	}
   	else
   	{
   		return new Date(i);
   	}
   }
   
2. peterd says:

   February 20, 2008 at 1:02 pm

   David,

   Great tip, thanks!

   Peter
3. Robert says:

   April 8, 2008 at 7:43 am

   David, Peter

   From my experience, if you can’t guarantee the given parameter dateStr is a valid date you should check for NaN using isNaN(i).
   Many thanks for the useful example!

   Have fun
   Robert
4. yevgeny says:

   March 3, 2009 at 6:07 am

   thank you, thank you..:-)
   you saved me hours and hours
5. getkirk says:

   May 1, 2009 at 10:51 am

   Thanks for the example! Big help.
6. Daryl says:

   August 31, 2009 at 6:43 pm

   Thanks for this code, it is much appreciated.
7. Bill says:

   September 16, 2009 at 2:00 pm

   Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

   I’ll add the following for fellow Force.com developers who encounter difficulties converting from the SFDC (Salesforce.com) DateTime datatype to the Flex Date datatype.

   SFDC stores ISO format with milliseconds (i.e. “2009-09-22T15:00:00.000Z”) which I had to strip out before the above code would work
8. Hendra says:

   October 2, 2009 at 4:36 am

   Thank You very much. I got this isodate format from my C#( + Fluorine) webservice. I’ve been looking for the solution since yesterday.
9. Dani Belz says:

   October 9, 2009 at 12:07 am

   Hi, I had the big problem, that DateUtil.parseW3CDTF() failed when parsing a lot of dates. Then I found your solution and it solved my problem. Not only that but it is also way faster!

   But I have one improvement, that I would suggest: I have to work with GMT offsets, so I rewrote the parser like that:

   
dateString = dateString.replace(/(\d{4,4})\-(\d{2,2})\-(\d{2,2})/g, "$1/$2/$3");
dateString = dateString.replace("T", " ");
dateString = dateString.replace(/(\+|\-)(\d+):(\d+)/g, " GMT$1$2$3");
dateString = dateString.replace("Z", " GMT-0000");


   Maybe it’s useful for anybody ;-)

   -Dani
10. krange says:

    January 19, 2010 at 2:02 am

    For those that want to handle milliseconds, I modified the code a bit to add them in later.

    private function convertISOToDate() : Date 
    {
        var date : Date;
        var dateStr : String = timestamp;
        var milliseconds : Number = Number( dateStr.match( /\.[0-9]+/ ) ) * 1000;
        dateStr = dateStr.replace(/\-/g, "/");
        dateStr = dateStr.replace("T", " ");
        dateStr = dateStr.replace( /\.[0-9]+/, " " );
        dateStr = dateStr.replace("Z", " GMT-0000");
        date = new Date( Date.parse( dateStr ) );
        date.setMilliseconds( milliseconds );
        return date;
    }
11. Rob says:

    February 22, 2010 at 11:26 am

    very helpful, thanks!
12. ntaka says:

    September 29, 2010 at 6:52 am

    very helpful, thanks!

    check this post for converting a date string into date object http://www.ntaka.co.za/how-convert-date-string-to-date-object-using-flex
    • Anonymous says:

      October 7, 2010 at 7:39 pm

      Seems that the mx.formatters.DateFormatter class can parse an ISO date if you trim off the last 6 characters (i.e. the time zone offset). Here’s a real simple utility class:
      <code>
      package fleetcycle.cp.util
      {
      import mx.formatters.DateFormatter;

      public final class DateFormatterUtil
      {
      public static function parseISOString(str:String):Date
      {
      if (str != null && str.length > 0)
      {
      str = str.substring(0, str.length – 6);
      return DateFormatter.parseDateString(str)
      } else
      {
      return null;
      }
      }
      }
      }
      <code>
      And here is a FlexUnit test method that verifies it works:
      <code>
      [Test]
      public function test_parse_standardutil():void
      {
      var dt:Date = DateFormatterUtil.parseISOString(“2010-03-20T06:30:23-05:00″);
      assertEquals(2010, dt.fullYear);
      assertEquals(2, dt.month);
      assertEquals(20, dt.date);
      assertEquals(6, dt.hours);
      assertEquals(30, dt.minutes);
      assertEquals(23, dt.seconds);
      }
      <code>
13. Tahir Azeem Alvi says:

    January 11, 2011 at 11:52 pm

    Hi,

    i have a problem face from last day.

    The problem is that i want to run a countdown Timer. The timer is start from two dates
    1. current date (as New Date()).
    2. the immediate Monday (as new Date(“Mon Jan 17 2011″))

    The problem is with 2nd date.

    How i dynamically find the next Monday date ?.

    Thanks and welcome for Help.