date to timestamp in javascript

Question

Is it possible in javascript to convert some date in timestamp ?

i have date in this format 2010-03-09 12:21:00 and i want to convert it into its equivalent time stamp with javascript.

Answer 1

In response to your edit:

You need to parse the date string to build a Date object, and then you can get the timestamp, for example:

function getTimestamp(str) {
  var d = str.match(/\d+/g); // extract date parts
  return +new Date(d[0], d[1] - 1, d[2], d[3], d[4], d[5]); // build Date object
}

getTimestamp("2010-03-09 12:21:00"); // 1268158860000

In the above function I use a simple regular expression to extract the digits, then I build a new Date object using the Date constructor with that parts (Note: The Date object handles months as 0 based numbers, e.g. 0-Jan, 1-Feb, ..., 11-Dec).

Then I use the unary plus operator to get the timestamp.

Note also that the timestamp is expressed in milliseconds.

Answer 2

+(new Date())

Does the job.

Answer 3

The getTime() method of Date object instances returns the number of milliseconds since the epoch; that's a pretty good timestamp.