JavaScript Date Formats and new Date()

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally all our dates were in the format MM/dd/yyyy across the board. The client wants them MM-dd-yy. I ran into some JavaScript bugs after the change. Specifically...

var date = new Date("08/10/2010"); // works

var date = new Date("08-10-10");  // Console logs invalid date

I'm pulling the date string from a text input. I'm a) not sure why JavaScript will parse one and not the other and b) what I can do to get JavaScript to parse the latter.

[Bear Bibeault]

I hate dealing with dates with a passion. Can you use the date parsing utility function provided by the jQuery UI datepicker? If not, you might need to regex the string and reform it to something that Date() likes. Icky icky icky.

[Tom Varga]

Convert your date string into an accepted date format:

var dateStr = "08-10-10";
var repairedDateStr = dateStr.replace (/(\d\d)-(\d\d)-(\d\d)/, "$1/$2/20$3");	// 08/10/2010

var date = new Date(repairedDateStr);

See the following pages, they will be useful:
Date object,
Regular Expression (RegExp) object.

[Gregg Bolinger]

Bear Bibeault wrote:I hate dealing with dates with a passion. Can you use the date parsing utility function provided by the jQuery UI datepicker? If not, you might need to regex the string and reform it to something that Date() likes. Icky icky icky.

Perfect!

var date = $.datepicker.parseDate('mm-dd-y', $('.startDateRange').val());

[Paul Clapham]

I know I'm being an old fuddy-duddy, but is that code Y2K-compliant? Tom Varga's code wasn't... but perhaps you won't be expecting dates before 2000?

[Gregg Bolinger]

Paul Clapham wrote:I know I'm being an old fuddy-duddy, but is that code Y2K-compliant? Tom Varga's code wasn't... but perhaps you won't be expecting dates before 2000?

I think anytime you go to a 2 digit year, Y2K goes out of the window. We're not expected to have any dates prior to 2000 though. We brought this up to the client.