Working with dates in PHP and Javascript

Question

I have some dates stored in YYYY-MM-DD format in a MySQL database that I need to pass to JQuery for use in a JQuery UI Calendar. The problem I'm having is that `2014年01月12日 in PHP is January 12 2014, but February 12, 2014 in Javascript.

This is because 0 = January in Javascript.

So how can I reliably pass a date to Javascript?

I've tried doing a simple strtotime "-month", but obviously that's not actually what I want -- I don't want exactly a month to be removed, I want the date to remain the same, but in a different format.

Thanks!

Update:

<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
<?php 
$startDate = date("Y,n,j", strtotime('-1 month'));
$endDate = date("Y,n,j", strtotime('+1 year -1 month')); 
?>
var startDate = new Date(<?php echo $startDate; ?>);
var endDate = new Date(<?php echo $endDate; ?>);

• Amal: The problem I'm having is that 2014年01月12日 in PHP is January 12 2014, but February 12, 2014 in Javascript. -- Show us how you pass the dates.
• adeneo: Months are zero based in javascript, somewhere you're messing something up!
• Chuck Le Butt: @adeneo Isn't that exactly what I say in my question?
• Ruud Helderman: Missing quotes, maybe? var startDate = new Date("<?php echo $startDate; ?>"); EDIT: ah no, never mind; I overlooked the comma's...
• adeneo: If you're using strtotime, why not just pass the unix timestamp, that would be the same in PHP, Javascript and anywhere else ?

Answer 1

In JavaScript, months are zero-based. It might be nonsense at first, but consider this:

var names = ["Jan","Feb","Mar"...];
var thisMonth = names[date.getMonth()];

Pretty cool! But yeah, it's a gotcha, and subtracting a month in PHP won't fix it (especially if you're working in January).

You will need to subtract one from the months in the JavaScript side. Try this:

alert(new Date(<?php echo date("Y,n-1,j"); ?>));

• Chuck Le Butt: Perfect! Exactly what I needed. No messing around with Unix Timestamps either. Thanks.

Answer 2

Something like this, should do the job:

Database query:
SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date_field) AS mydate FROM table;
In Javascript:
var jsDate = new Date(<?php echo mydate; ?> * 1000);

• Hackerman: I think nobody got the point...in this way we works with numbers, and got the right date...thanks a lot downvoter ;)
• Chuck Le Butt: The rest of the project works with date. I think I'd rather stay with that than introducing new date formats, thanks.
• Hackerman: Don't worry, it's always good to have a set of answers, instead of just one...more choices, one never knows
• Ruud Helderman: Not portable to some other DB engines, but still a very elegant solution. +1