Make a date object take timezone into consideration

Question

I'm using the following piece of code:

$.log('Ending time: ' + ending_time);
$.log('Now: ' + new Date());
$.log('Difference: ' + new Date(ending_time - new Date()));

The output is the following:

Ending time: Thu Apr 23 2009 14:31:29 GMT+0200
Now: Thu Apr 23 2009 11:56:02 GMT+0200
Difference: Thu Jan 01 1970 03:35:26 GMT+0100

I'm using the "difference" to display how many hours and minutes there are left until ending_time, but because of the timezone differences, I get the wrong time (offset by one hour.) So is there any neat way of calculating the difference taking timezones into account?

Answer 1

You should be able to use the getTimezoneOffset function.

Check it out here.

Answer 2

You can use the following:

(new Date()).getTimezoneOffset()

which will give you the timezone offset of the client's browser in minutes. Of course you also need to know the timezone offset of ending time.

Answer 3

You are no longer dealing with a date, so don't convert it to one. You have a time difference, which doesn't have a time zone for instance. The result should be in milliseconds, so perform the appropriate math to get minutes, hours, days, or possibly all of the above as needed.