Datatable date sorting dd/mm/yyyy issue

Question

I am using a Jquery plugin called datatables

Its fantastic, however I cannot get the dates to sort correctly according to the dd/mm/yyyy format.

I have looked at their support formats but none of these fixes seem to work.

Can anybody here help me please?

Answer 1

Update 2020: HTML Solution

Since HTML 5 is so much developed and almost all major browser supporting it. So now a much cleaner approach is to use HTML5 data attributes (maxx777 provided a PHP solution I am using the simple HTML). For non-numeric data as in our scenario, we can use data-sort or data-order attribute and assign a sortable value to it.

HTML

<td data-sort='YYYYMMDD'>DD/MM/YYYY</td> 

Here is working HTML solution

jQuery Solution

Here is working jQuery solution.

jQuery.extend( jQuery.fn.dataTableExt.oSort, { "date-uk-pre": function ( a ) {     var ukDatea = a.split('/');     return (ukDatea[2] + ukDatea[1] + ukDatea[0]) * 1; },  "date-uk-asc": function ( a, b ) {     return ((a < b) ? -1 : ((a > b) ? 1 : 0)); },  "date-uk-desc": function ( a, b ) {     return ((a < b) ? 1 : ((a > b) ? -1 : 0)); } } );   

Add the above code to script and set the specific column with Date values with { "sType": "date-uk" } and others as null, see below:

$(document).ready(function() {     $('#example').dataTable( {         "aoColumns": [             null,             null,             null,             null,             { "sType": "date-uk" },             null         ]     });     }); 

Answer 2

Date Sort - with a hidden element

Convert the date to the format YYYYMMDD and prepend to the actual value (DD/MM/YYYY) in the <td>, wrap it in an element, set style display:none; to the elements. Now the date sort will work as a normal sort. The same can be applied to date-time sort.

HTML

<table id="data-table">    <tr>      <td><span>YYYYMMDD</span>DD/MM/YYYY</td>    </tr> </table> 

CSS

#data-table span {     display:none;  }