How do you convert a JavaScript date to UTC?

Question

Suppose a user of your website enters a date range.

2009-1-1 to 2009-1-3

You need to send this date to a server for some processing, but th

Answer 1

Looking at your question its clear that you just want to send the date range to your backend for further post processing.

I am assuming you are conforming to the standard data guidelines which expect the data to be in a particular format. For example, I use ODATA which is a RESTfull API which expects date time objects to be in the format:-

YYYY-MM-DDT00:00:00.

That can be easily achieved via the snippet posted below(Please change the format as per your requirement).

var mydate;//assuming this is my date object which I want to expose var UTCDateStr = mydate.getUTCFullYear() + "-" + mydate.getUTCMonth() + "-" + mydate.getUTCDate() + "T00:00:00";

If on the other hand, you are in my situation wherein you have received a date from your backend, and the browser converts that to your local date. You on the other hand are interested in the UTC date then you can perform the following:-

var mydate;//assuming this is my date object which I want to expose var UTCDate = new Date(mydate);/*create a copy of your date object. Only needed if you for some reason need the original local date*/ UTCDate.setTime(UTCDate.getTime() + UTCDate.getTimezoneOffset() * 60 * 1000);

The code snippet above basically adds/subtracts the time added/subtracted by the browser based on the timezone.

For example if I am in EST(GMT-5) and my Service returns a date time object = Wed Aug 17 2016 00:00:00 GMT-0500 my browser automatically subtracts the timezone offset(5hrs) to get my local time. So if I try to fetch the time I get Wed Aug 16 2016 19:00:00 GMT-0500. This causes a lot of problems. There are a lot of libraries out there which will definitely make this easier but I wanted to share the pure JS approach.

For more info please have a look at: http://praveenlobo.com/blog/how-to-convert-javascript-local-date-to-utc-and-utc-to-local-date/ where in I got my inspiration.

Hope this helps!