How to convert string to date using JavaScript - examples! In this post we will cover various technics and show how to fix common errors like:
"Unable to convert '25-12-2020'  into a date"  or "Unable to convert "Invalid Date" into a date"!

 So let us start, let's convert this string '25-12-2020'  to date:

                    const testDate = '25-12-2020';
const formatDate = new Date(testDate);
console.log(formatDate);

Executing this code we will have error: "Unable to convert "Invalid Date" into a date"

The reason for this format of the string, you date should be structured in a way year-month-day and not day-mont-year. So if we change our string to: 2020-12-25  code will work fine:

                    const testDate = '2020-12-25';
const formatDate = new Date(testDate);
console.log(formatDate); // output: Fri Dec 25 2020 01:00:00 GMT+0100 (Central European Standard Time)

By using Angular you can achieve the same thing by using formatDate() method:

                    formatDate(range.start, 'yyyy-MM-dd', 'en');
Photo by Luis Cortes on Unsplash
Photo by Luis Cortes on Unsplash

As you saw in our latest output, date is in the user default time zone. Sometimes this can cause a trouble because if you have users from different timezones they will get different results.

So the best way is to convert the date in UTC format

Let's take a look this example:

                    const testDate = '2020-12-25 00:00:00';
const formatDate = new Date(testDate);
console.log(formatDate);// output: Fri Dec 25 2020 00:00:00 GMT+0100 (Central European Standard Time)

But if we convert this time into UTC, we will not only get different time but different date:

                    const testDate = '2020-12-25 00:00:00';
const formatDate = new Date(testDate).toUTCString();
console.log(formatDate); // output: Thu, 24 Dec 2020 23:00:00 GMT

we should keep this in mind when getting or parsing the dates from our users.

Happy 2021 🧨