Comments on: Date Format 1.1

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:36:56 +0000

@Jules, of course a literal "Z" in an ISO 8601-formatted time does not indicate a US timezone. It indicates that UTC time is being used. It would not be right to append a literal "Z" unless the dateFormat function knew it was working with a UTC-based date object. Edit: Date Format 1.2 supports conversion to UTC time.

By: Jules

Jules — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:23:05 +0000

It still isn’t a “US timezone abbreviation”, as stated it indicates a +0000 time offset, this is an offset from UTC and will always be several hours out from any US timezone. Zulu time was originally a military designation AFAIK.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:05:33 +0000

Not exactly. ISO 8601 (which covers the representation of dates and times, not formatting masks) uses a literal "Z" at the end of a time string to indicate that the time uses UTC/GMT/Zulu time. I.e., it's the same as adding "+0000". Using Date Format, you can add a literal Z to the end of a formatted string by wrapping it in quotes (see details in the Date Format documentation). According to ISO 8601, if you don't include a literal Z, the timezone is assumed to be the local time unless you alternatively specify the UTC offset (which you can easily do using Date Format's "o" flag or the named mask "isoFullDateTime"). The JavaScript Date and Date.prototype objects include a number of methods for working with date objects using UTC rather than local time. The use of "Z" as a flag to indicate that the timezone abbreviation should be embedded in the formatted string comes from the C and POSIX standards for formatting time (see the date utility and strftime function).

By: Andy Pook

Andy Pook — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:33:06 +0000

Z at the end of a datetime format should refer to “Zulu” or UTC time (aka GMT) not any zone based in the USA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601