Date Operations in Javascript

Question

I currently have two variables:

appointment_date and appointment_time which are in the format dd/mm/yyyy and (h)h:mm respectively.

The time is 12 hour format but for times before 12PM there is no zero padding as I am grabbing these values from the DOM and this is how it is presented.

I am trying to compare the current date and time with these two values to calculate if the time difference is less than 24 hours which I am able to do with the following hard-coded date objects:

var todays_date = new Date(2013, 04, 19, 15, 40, 0);
var appointment_date = new Date(2013, 04, 20, 15, 30, 0);

todays_date = todays_date.getTime();
appointment_date = appointment_date.getTime();

if ((appointment_date - todays_date) >  86400000) { // number of milliseconds in a day
    // proceed 
} else {
    alert('less than 24 hours');
}

I can make a date time object from today's date by doing

var todays_date = new Date();

but I don't know the best way to create a new date object from appointment_date and appointment_time, bearing in mind that certain times will need to be zero padded as well.

I considered trying to replace the / in the date with , and the : in time with a , and joining the two with a , in between but I was hoping that were would be a more elegant solution?

What you considered wouldn't work. The Date constructor you're using in your hard coded example has individual number arguments being passed to it; whereas you'd be passing a single argument - a string - that happens to look kind of like the argument list if you were using it properly. — Anthony Grist
– Anthony Grist, Commented May 9, 2013 at 8:48
Side note: Avoid leading zeros on number literals, e.g. don't write 04, write 4. Some implementations, in non-strict mode, will treat a number literal starting with a zero as octal rather than decimal. — T.J. Crowder
– T.J. Crowder, Commented May 9, 2013 at 8:49
my rule of thumb with dates is always use epoch times in the code. use formatted dates only for output — David Fregoli
– David Fregoli, Commented May 9, 2013 at 8:56

T.J. Crowder · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-09 08:48:22Z

4

Just split the appointment_date string into its three parts (split('/'), for instance), convert those parts to numbers, do the same with the appointment_time (split(':')), remember to subtract one from the month value (months are zero-based), and pass those numbers into the Date constructor.

answered May 9, 2013 at 8:48

T.J. Crowder

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