JavaScript ISO 8601 string into Date object

Question

Consider the following two snippets in a browser's JavaScript console (I have tried with Google Chrome)

1st Statement:

s = "2014-03-03 18:30:00";
d = new Date(s);
// Mon Mar 03 2014 18:30:00 GMT+0100 (CET)

2nd Statement:

s = "2014-03-03T18:30:00";
d = new Date(s);
// Mon Mar 03 2014 19:30:00 GMT+0100 (CET)

See? The parsed date and time differs with one hour for me, as I live in UTC+1.

But why does the JavaScript Date object parse these two strings differently, for there is no time zone given at all?

Answer 1

• The 2014-03-03T... notation is a fancy JavaScript Date Time String Format and expects a time zone. If you don't provide one, it defaults to Z (UTC).

• The 2014-03-03 18:30:00 notation, however, is just a regular string without an interesting name and, if you don't provide a time zone, it assumes local time.

This info was taken from the MDN article about Date.parse().