Date.parse(2/4/2011 9:34:48 AM)

Question

my input will be from a variable (Ticket.CreationDate) and will look like

2/4/2011 9:34:48 AM (it will vary of course)

Ideally I could pass in the variable as-i

Answer 1

I would suggest a combination of 2 different Date libraries I am aware of.

The first, for parsing the date from a string, is DateJS. You can find it at http://www.datejs.com/. Your example parses with their library fine (once you include appropriate quote marks)

// Results in Date object whose toString is:  
//    Fri Feb 04 2011 09:34:48 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time)
Date.parse('2/4/2011 9:34:48 AM')

The other library is for creating nicely formatted string values based on your date object. This can be found at http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/date-time-format. For example, from that page:

// Saturday, June 9th, 2007, 5:46:21 PM
var now = new Date();
dateFormat(now, "ffffdd, mmmm dS, yyyy, h:MM:ss TT");