reverse date formatting in as3

Question

As3 has some functions that help with converting a date to various formats of strings, but I cannot find any functions that do the opposite.

in the case of

• 2012-04-16 I'd like to use YYYY-MM-DD as my format string to get a date object
• 01/01/2013 12:00.13 I would specify `DD/MM/YYYY HH:NN.SS

Is ther something that does the reverse/opposite of formatDate ?

Answer 1

Leveraging off a similar question ( Parse string pattern into Date in Flex ), you can use DateField.stringToDate to get the date portion of the string:

var theDate:Date
theDate = DateField.stringToDate('2012-04-16', 'YYYY-MM-DD');  // Returns 16 April 2012
theDate = DateField.stringToDate('01/02/2013', 'DD/MM/YYYY');  // Returns 1 Feb 2013

Unfortunately this only parses the date, not the time.

There are examples of using RegExp to parse out the different date-time components and then creating the Date with the values thus parsed, but I've not seen or done anything like the generic format string approach.