ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Working with dates and times
var millisecondsPerDay:int = 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24;
// gets a Date one day after the start date of 1/1/1970
var startTime:Date = new Date(millisecondsPerDay);
Third, you can pass multiple numeric parameters to the Date() constructor. It treats those parameters as the year,
month, day, hour, minute, second, and millisecond, respectively, and returns a corresponding Date object. Those input
parameters are assumed to be in local time rather than UTC. The following statements get a Date object set to midnight
at the start of January 1, 2000, in local time:
var millenium:Date = new Date(2000, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
Fourth, you can pass a single string parameter to the Date() constructor. It will try to parse that string into date or
time components and then return a corresponding Date object. If you use this approach, it’s a good idea to enclose the
Date() constructor in a try..catch block to trap any parsing errors. The Date() constructor accepts a number of
different string formats (which are listed in the ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform). The
following statement initializes a new Date object using a string value:
var nextDay:Date = new Date("Mon May 1 2006 11:30:00 AM");
If the Date() constructor cannot successfully parse the string parameter, it will not raise an exception. However, the
resulting Date object will contain an invalid date value.
Getting time unit values
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
You can extract the values for various units of time within a Date object using properties or methods of the Date class.
Each of the following properties gives you the value of a time unit in the Date object:
The fullYear property
The month property, which is in a numeric format with 0 for January up to 11 for December
The date property, which is the calendar number of the day of the month, in the range of 1 to 31
The day property, which is the day of the week in numeric format, with 0 standing for Sunday
The hours property, in the range of 0 to 23
The minutes property
The seconds property
The milliseconds property
In fact, the Date class gives you a number of ways to get each of these values. For example, you can get the month
value of a Date object in four different ways:
The month property
The getMonth() method
The monthUTC property
The getMonthUTC() method
All four ways are essentially equivalent in terms of efficiency, so you can use whichever approach suits your
application best.
The properties just listed all represent components of the total date value. For example, the milliseconds property
will never be greater than 999, since when it reaches 1000 the seconds value increases by 1 and the milliseconds
property resets to 0.
Last updated 6/6/2012
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