Convert an ISO 8601 Date String to / from a Native AS3 Date Object

Posted by Brooks in Flash on Feb 23rd, 2009 | 15 comments

While making some improvements to my ilist metadata (iTunes MPEG4 style metadata) classes I ended up needing to convert an ISO 8601 date and time string to a native AS3 Date object and vice versa.

An ISO 8601 date and time string comes in two flavors, basic and extended. As you can see below, the basic format simply eschews dashes and colons in favor of a more compact syntax.

  • Basic – 20090221T090000Z
  • Extended – 2009-02-21T09:00:00Z

The standard requires a fixed number of digits to represent a date (8 digits) or a time (6 digits). When fewer digits are needed to represent a date / time the number must be padded with leading zeros. The Z at the end of the string designates the UTC “Zulu” timezone (GMT or so called universal time).

I took a quick buzz around the interwebs, but couldn’t find an AS3 lib that could convert one of these strings into a date object or take a date object and have it generate a correctly formatted string, so, you guessed it–I spent my Sunday evening whipping together a utility class that will do the trick (download the source here).

I’m not claiming compliance with every nook and cranny of the spec, but it covers the fundamentals decently. Hand the util an AS3 Date object and you can generate a date, time or date + time in the basic or extended format. You can also parse a basic / extended date, time or date + time string and have an AS3 Date object returned with the appropriate UTC values set on it.

Here’s what the basic usage would look like for a date + time scenario:

// instantiate a ISO8601Util object
 var util:ISO8601Util = new ISO8601Util();
// parse a date + time string into an AS3 Date  - takes either a basic or 
// extended representation         
var date:Date = util.parseDateTimeString( "2009-02-21T09:07:59Z" );
 
// to turn a date into an ISO 8601 date + time representation grab a date object
var currentdate:Date = new Date();
// create a string with the extended or basic format
var extended:String = util.formatExtendedDateTime( currentdate )
var basic:String = util.formatBasicDateTime( currentdate );

Hopefully, I’m now the only poor bastard who has to do this!



15 Responses to “ “Convert an ISO 8601 Date String to / from a Native AS3 Date Object”

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    March 5, 2009 at 12:24 am

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  2. Patrick says:
    March 7, 2009 at 7:36 pm

    Thanks, you saved me bunches of time. I owe you a beer!

  3. Chadwick says:
    March 27, 2009 at 5:05 pm

    Looking for a solution to the same problem, yours was close but I also needed to parse time zone information. Turns out Flex has the DateUtil class that will do this for us!

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/691342/how-to-parse-an-iso-formatted-date-in-flex-as3

  4. Mark says:
    June 17, 2009 at 2:56 pm

    Thanks a ton.. I owe you a beer too..
    Your class just worked awesome , saved hours..

  5. Chris says:
    August 16, 2009 at 5:13 am

    you’ve saved me alot of time aswell… many thanks. I was working on a myspace app and couldn’t get the date formatting nicely.

  6. waleed anbar says:
    October 26, 2009 at 7:34 pm

    rock on, thanks!

  7. Jake says:
    November 18, 2009 at 3:10 pm

    Thanks for this class! Works great.

  8. Adam says:
    February 26, 2010 at 3:25 pm

    Thanks – saved me some time as well. As a note, I converted all functions/consts to static, so I can call the conversions w/o instantiating the class.

  9. Chris says:
    May 4, 2010 at 7:31 am

    Great work and many thanks. You saved me loads of time aswell.

  10. Toby says:
    May 9, 2010 at 11:43 am

    I was looking for something to convert mysql datetime fields which are formatted like so:

    2009-11-24 11:11:10

    Very similar to the extended pattern, so I modified the parseDateTime function to handle this as well:

    #replace with a space (and trim if you want)
    val = val.replace(/-|:|T|Z/g, ” “);

    #stays the same
    var date:Date = parseBasicDate(val.substr(0, 8));

    #start at 9, not 8
    date = parseBasicTime(val.substr(9, 6), date);

    Thanks for the util.

  11. Toby says:
    May 9, 2010 at 11:52 am

    That last post was posted before it was complete damnit!

    Obviously if you replace those delimiters with a space then the 0,8 and 9,6 boundries will no longer work, so you can just change the boundries.

    However, better solution is to simply remove any white space from val as well:

    val = val.replace(/-|:|T|Z|\s/g, ”);

    Then everything else works as is.

  12. Ruben says:
    August 6, 2010 at 11:35 am

    Hi,

    works like a charm, thanks! I only set all functions to static, that way you save the line for creating an object that actually has no need to be created, I personally like that better.

    Cheers!

  13. Trent says:
    August 12, 2010 at 9:36 pm

    Excellent! This saved me a good bit of time – thanks!

  14. Sebastian Zarzycki says:
    August 13, 2010 at 7:30 am

    That saved me some time while parsing NewsML date – thanks a lot!

  15. David says:
    August 31, 2010 at 5:35 am

    Great, thanks!

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