Parse 'Date & Time' string in Javascript which are of custom format

A better solution, I am now using date.js - https://code.google.com/p/datejs/

I included the script in my html page as this -

<script type="text/javascript" src="path/to/date.js"></script>

Then I simply parsed the date string "2015-01-16 22:15:00" with specifying the format as,

var dateString = "2015-01-16 22:15:00";
var date = Date.parse(dateString, "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");

new Date("2015-01-16T22:15:00")

See Date.parse().

The string must be in the ISO-8601 format. If you want to parse other formats use moment.js.

moment("2015-01-16 22:15:00").toDate();

I was trying to use moment.js guys. But since I was having this error, "ReferenceError: moment is not defined", I had to skip it for now. I am using an temporary workaround for now.

function parseDate(dateString) {
    var dateTime = dateString.split(" ");
    var dateOnly = dateTime[0];
    var timeOnly = dateTime[1];

    var temp = dateOnly + "T" + timeOnly;
    return new Date(temp);
}

Bit annoying, but not hard to write a parsing method yourself without any dependencies. Regular expressions are great to check the input against one or many date formats. Though, the Date in the format provided 'just works' by now. I.e. new Date('2015-01-16 22:15:00') works for me in firefox. I did this for a date that looked like '08.10.2020 10:40:32', which does not work and maybe the date provided does not work in some browsers. But this way you can parse it without relying on built in parsing methods.

function getAsDate(input) {
    if (!input) return null;
    if (input instanceof Date) return input;

    // match '2015-01-16 22:15:00'
    const regexDateMatch = '^[0-9]{4}\-[0-9]{1,2}\-[0-9]{1,2}\ [0-9]{2}\:[0-9]{2}\:[0-9]{2}$';
    if(input.match(regexDateMatch)) {
        const [year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds] = input.split(/[-: ]/).map(x => parseInt(x));
        const date = new Date(year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds);
        return date;
    }

    // Date formats supported by JS
    return new Date(input);
}

Using Regex capture groups as suggested would also be an option.

function getAsDate(input) {
    if (!input) return null;
    if (input instanceof Date) return input;

    // match '2015-01-16 22:15:00'
    const regexDateMatch = '^([0-9]{4})\-([0-9]{1,2})\-([0-9]{1,2})\ ([0-9]{2})\:([0-9]{2})\:([0-9]{2})$';
    let match;
    if((match = input.match(regexDateMatch))) {
        const [year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds] = match.slice(1, 7).map(x => parseInt(x));
        const date = new Date(year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds);
        return date;
    }

    // Date formats supported by JS
    return new Date(input);
}

Hopefully JS upcomming temporal API will have a proper widely supported way to parse dates with a custom template. Then eventually we won´t have to deal with this anymore and all the other oddities of JS Date.

If you are sure it's in the desired format and don't need to error check, you can parse it manually using split (and optionally replace). I needed to do something similar in my project (MM/DD/YYYY HH:mm:ss:sss) and modified my solution to fit your format. Notice the subtraction of 1 in the month.

var str = "2015-01-16 22:15:00"; 
//Replace dashes and spaces with : and then split on :
var strDate = str.replace(/-/g,":").replace(/ /g,":").split(":");
var aDate = new Date(strDate[0], strDate[1]-1, strDate[2], strDate[3], strDate[4], strDate[5]) ; 

I searched through all possible solutions and, since Moment.js is now deprecated, I found that date-fns package is what solves this problem in the simplest and most elegant way.

You can use their API such as

parse(<date_string>, <date_format>, <new Date object>).

An example usage is

parse("22.11.2033.", "dd.MM.yyyy.", new Date()).

You can consult the docs for more info on the format. You can install the library from NPM as "date-fns".