Building a directive that takes a date string for an attribute. If bound to a Date object, the interpolated value passed to the $observe/$watch function is an ISO string surrounded by double quotes.

Markup:

  <my-directive today="{{selectedDate}}"/>

link method:

  attrs.$observe('today', function(val) { opts.today  = new Date(val); });

Value of 'val' received in function and viewed in console looks like:

  ""2016-02-12T22:59:26.630Z""

This can be resolved with opts.today = new Date(eval(val)) but it would be necessary to see if someone actually supplied a static string date for the attribute instead of a bound object by checking for a leading quote.

Is this working as designed or is it a bug?