One of the largest genealogy websites "Ancestry Hometown" is showing a date of Jan 1, 3900. How on earth did this get posted and what is the logic behind the error?...is there any?

http://www.ancestry.com/

-- Laurane (familyties@rttinc.com), January 01, 2000

Answers

Looks like this is where it came from:

function dateString(oneDate) { var theMonth = monthNames[oneDate.getMonth() + 1] var theYear = oneDate.getYear() + 1900 return theMonth + " " + oneDate.getDate() + ", " + theYear

2000 + 1900 = 3900. Funny how that works.

-- =DSA. (dsangal@attglobal.net), January 01, 2000.

Oops, sorry about the formatting. One more time:

function dateString(oneDate) { var theMonth = monthNames[oneDate.getMonth() + 1] var theYear = oneDate.getYear() + 1900 return theMonth + " " + oneDate.getDate() + ", " + theYear }

Looks to me like oneDate.getYear() returns 2000, not 100 (which appears to be what the coder was expecting).

-- =DSA. (dsangal@attglobal.net), January 01, 2000.

Here is the site for the U.S. Naval Observatory. It also has the year as 3900.

-- shari (shari_h72@hotmail.com), January 01, 2000.

sorry! :)

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA/data/docs/RS_OneDay.html

-- shari (shari_h72@hotmail.com), January 01, 2000.

Oh, fer cryin' out loud.

* function dateString(oneDate) { * var theMonth = monthNames[oneDate.getMonth()+1] * var theYear = oneDate.getYear()+1900 * return theMonth+" "+oneDate.getDate()+", "+theYear * }

Sheesh.

-- =DSA. (dsangal@attglobal.net), January 01, 2000.

Hey, don't mind me . . . I just want to use up some bandwidth and resources until I get this right. =8^b

function dateString(oneDate) {
var theMonth = monthNames[oneDate.getMonth() + 1]
var theYear = oneDate.getYear() + 1900
return theMonth + " " + oneDate.getDate() + ", " + theYear
}

-- =DSA. (dsangal@attglobal.net), January 01, 2000.

I have seen the date "3900" on many sites today. Not that it matters, but it has been amusing.

-- semper paratus (happy@new.year), January 01, 2000.

3900 date also seen at www.albuquerquetribune.com today, 01/01/00, along with lots of reports on how nothing happened, all is well in area, state, country...

-- Debby (Debbynospam@swcp.com), January 01, 2000.

In early browsers, the JavaScript getYear function returs a 2 digit year, and 100 for year 2000. Newer browsers return a 2 digit year through 1999, then return a 4 digit year after 2000. The early way to go from 2 digits to 4 was to add 1900. But, to be compatibel with all browsers, the proper technique must check the value returned by getYear to see if it is a 2 digit or 4 digit value, and ojnly adding 1900 to 2 digit values.

-- nobody (nobody@nowhere.com), January 01, 2000.