What is the difference between new Date(“2017-01-01”) and new Date(“2017-1-1”)? [duplicate]

Answer 1

When parsing dates, JavaScript interprets ISO dates as UTC time and other formats as local time.

As MDN article suggests,

Where the string is ISO 8601 date only, the UTC time zone is used to interpret arguments.

Given a date string of "March 7, 2014", parse() assumes a local time zone, but given an ISO format such as "2014-03-07" it will assume a time zone of UTC (ES5 and ECMAScript 2015). Therefore Date objects produced using those strings may represent different moments in time depending on the version of ECMAScript supported unless the system is set with a local time zone of UTC. This means that two date strings that appear equivalent may result in two different values depending on the format of the string that is being converted.

// 2017-03-28 is interpreted as UTC time,
// shown as 2017-03-28 00:00:00 in UTC timezone,
// shown as 2017-03-28 06:00:00 in my timezone:
console.log("ISO dates:");
var isoDates = [new Date("2017-03-28")];
for (var dt of isoDates)
{
  console.log(dt.toUTCString() + " / " + dt.toLocaleString());
}

// Other formats are interpreted as local time, 
// shown as 2017-03-27 18:00:00 in my timezone,
// shown 2017-03-28 00:00:00 in my timezone:
console.log("Other formats:");
var otherDates = [new Date("2017-3-28"), new Date("March 28, 2017"), new Date("2017/03/28")];
for (var dt of otherDates)
{
  console.log(dt.toUTCString() + " / " + dt.toLocaleString());
}