Does Javascript/EcmaScript3 support ISO8601 date parsing?
This is an excellent implementation which covers edge cases and falls back to native implementation. https://github.com/csnover/js-iso8601/
Try this: http://anentropic.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/javascript-iso8601-parser-and-pretty-dates/
As others have mentioned, it's not in the 3rd edition specification. It is in the 5th edition specification however, and I quote:
ECMAScript defines a string interchange format for date-times based upon a simplification of the ISO 8601 Extended Format. The format is as follows: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ
So it should be trickling into browsers soon (IE9, Chrome 1, Firefox 4 are at least some of the browsers supporting ISO 8601 dates). If you want to implement a solution in the meantime, you might want to optimize so that your script can take advantage of the native if available:
(function ()
{
if (isNaN(Date.parse("2010-02-23T23:04:48Z")))
{
var oldParse = Date.parse;
Date.parse = function (strTime)
{
// regex test strTime for ISO 8601, use oldParse if it isn't
// Use custom parser if it is.
}
}
})();
On the question in the title: Not natively (as you've tested :) )
In ECMA-262 (3/e) the only requirement for Date.parse
[15.9.4.2] is the round-trip conversion via .toString()
and .toUTCString()
won't change the Date object, i.e.
Date.parse(x.toString()) == Date.parse(x.toUTCString()) == x
and both .toString()
[15.9.5.2] and .toUTCString()
[15.9.5.42] are implementation-dependent, so what format Date.parse
can parse is totally unspecified.