Date Operations in Javascript

Question

I currently have two variables:

appointment_date and appointment_time which are in the format dd/mm/yyyy and (h)h:mm respectively.

The time is 12 hour format but for times before 12PM there is no zero padding as I am grabbing these values from the DOM and this is how it is presented.

I am trying to compare the current date and time with these two values to calculate if the time difference is less than 24 hours which I am able to do with the following hard-coded date objects:

var todays_date = new Date(2013, 04, 19, 15, 40, 0);
var appointment_date = new Date(2013, 04, 20, 15, 30, 0);

todays_date = todays_date.getTime();
appointment_date = appointment_date.getTime();

if ((appointment_date - todays_date) >  86400000) { // number of milliseconds in a day
    // proceed 
} else {
    alert('less than 24 hours');
}

I can make a date time object from today's date by doing

var todays_date = new Date();

but I don't know the best way to create a new date object from appointment_date and appointment_time, bearing in mind that certain times will need to be zero padded as well.

I considered trying to replace the / in the date with , and the : in time with a , and joining the two with a , in between but I was hoping that were would be a more elegant solution?

Answer 1

Just split the appointment_date string into its three parts (split('/'), for instance), convert those parts to numbers, do the same with the appointment_time (split(':')), remember to subtract one from the month value (months are zero-based), and pass those numbers into the Date constructor.