Manipulating dates in Javascript without the Date object

Question

It appears I can't use the javascript Date object as it inherintly defaults to US dates when you initialise with a datestring. There is no way of passing any culture information to the date object

I.e. No matter what the clients locale settings are

var d = new Date("08/10/2009") will always create a date object representing the 10th August 2009 rather than the 8th October 2009 if the clients locale was the UK.

So given that my requirement is to be able to add/subtract days/months/years easily is there a clever way of doing this easily without the Date object

All i need to do is add a day to a date (or a string representation of a date). so if my code detects the locale setttings are in the US, when it sees a string like "10/08/2009" it whacks it up to "10/09/2009" but if it had detected it was in the UK it would have know it a uk string representation of a date and whacked it up to "09/10/2009"

Christian C. Salvadó · Accepted Answer · 2009-10-08 18:59:05Z

3

For date manipulation and localization on JavaScript I always recommend the DateJS library.

This library abstracts the use of Date objects, has a very good localization options, powerful date parsing and formatting, and it also has a very nice fluent API.

answered Oct 8, 2009 at 18:59

Christian C. Salvadó

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kennebec · Accepted Answer · 2009-10-08 18:49:23Z

2

If you know you are getting input formatted dd/mm/yyyy you can easily assemble the correct date.

function britDay(D){
 D= D.match(/\d+/g);
 return new Date(+D[2], D[1]-1, +D[0]);
}

toLocaleDateString will return the date in the format expected by the user.

Relying on the user input that obeys particular formatting rules is optimistic- which is why most sites use separate, labeled inputs or select fields for the month, date and year.

answered Oct 8, 2009 at 18:49

kennebec

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3 Comments

user48408 Over a year ago

Thats the thing I don't know what way it will be formatted cos it will depend on what the locale settings are

TRiG Over a year ago

I'd call the function internationalDay() not britDay(). It's only the US that uses weird date style.

kennebec Over a year ago

Good call- but it is such a long name. Maybe dmyDay()

Berry · Accepted Answer · 2009-10-08 18:18:34Z

0

You probably know that it's easy to add one day to a date, just add 86,400 * 1000 milliseconds to the date. It sounds like displaying in your locale is the issue; does Date.toLocaleString() not do the right thing for you?

answered Oct 8, 2009 at 18:18

Berry

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1 Comment

Paul Tomblin Over a year ago

Adding "86400*1000 milliseconds" fails twice a year in places that use daylight savings time.

peller · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-11 04:07:01Z

0

dojo.date.locale.parse will be able to parse a formatted string according the locale of your choice. It has a table of cultural data based off unicode.org/cldr. See this article for more information.

answered Dec 11, 2009 at 4:07

peller

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