so I give up...been trying to do this all day;
I have a string that supplies a date and time in the format dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm (04/12/2012 07:00
dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm
04/12/2012 07:00
You can use the momentjs library to do this rather easily.
var epoch = moment(str).unix();
http://momentjs.com/