Which date formats are IETF-compliant RFC 2822 timestamps?

Question

I need to parse dates in JavaScript. The format is

[2 digits day]/[2 digits month]/[4 digits year] [2 digits hour (24 mode)]:[2 digits minute]

For example, 16/02/2013 21:00

But if I do new Date('16/02/2013 21:00').toString(), it gives 'Wed Apr 02 2014 21:00:00 GMT+0200 (Hora de verano romance)'.

I guess that's because my dates don't follow IETF RFC 2822 Date and Time Specification. Then, I should convert my string, and I want to convert it to the most similar compliant format (because it should be easier to convert). But http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#page-14 is hard to understand, so I don't know which is the most similar format.

Is there a list with examples of the allowed formats?

Answer 1

MSDN has several examples of valid date formats:

document.writeln((new Date("2010")).toUTCString()); 

document.writeln((new Date("2010-06")).toUTCString());

document.writeln((new Date("2010-06-09")).toUTCString());

 // Specifies Z, which indicates UTC time.
document.writeln((new Date("2010-06-09T15:20:00Z")).toUTCString());

 // Specifies -07:00 offset, which is equivalent to Pacific Daylight time.
document.writeln((new Date("2010-06-09T15:20:00-07:00")).toGMTString());

// Specifies a non-ISO Long date.
document.writeln((new Date("June 9, 2010")).toUTCString());

// Specifies a non-ISO Long date.
document.writeln((new Date("2010 June 9")).toUTCString());

// Specifies a non-ISO Short date and time.
document.writeln((new Date("6/9/2010 3:20 pm")).toUTCString());

// Output:
// Fri, 1 Jan 2010 00:00:00 UTC
// Tue, 1 Jun 2010 00:00:00 UTC
// Wed, 9 Jun 2010 00:00:00 UTC
// Wed, 9 Jun 2010 15:20:00 UTC
// Wed, 9 Jun 2010 22:20:00 UTC
// Wed, 9 Jun 2010 07:00:00 UTC
// Wed, 9 Jun 2010 07:00:00 UTC
// Wed, 9 Jun 2010 22:20:00 UTC

Gotchas

There's a matrix of cross-browser inconsistencies as well.

References

• Same Markup: Writing Cross-Browser Code – IEBlog

• Loading Javascript files in parallel – Kristoffer's tidbits