How to sort array of objects where keys are dates

Question

I have searched for this question and no existing answer seems to apply. Consider the following:

[
  { 'August 17th 2016': [75] }, // 75 is the length of the array which contains up to 75 objects ... 
  { 'August 1st 2016': [5] },
  { 'August 28th 2016': [5] },
  ...
]

What is the best way to sort the objects in this array by their date and still keep the "english" representation of their key?

Note: The key is used as a chart label.

Everywhere I look array.sort is used, but that's on the object's key of say created_at.

The result should be:

[
  { 'August 1st 2016': [5] },
  { 'August 17th 2016': [75] }
  { 'August 28th 2016': [5] },
  ...
]

I am not sure how to proceed so I don't have anything to show.

Answer 1

This can be accomplished by using date.parse on the object key. I took the first object key as it appears there is only 1 in each entry of the array. The tricky part is that date.parse does not work on "12th" or "1st", so, we have to temporarily replace the "th", or "st" with a ,. This way, date.parse works on the string.

var dates = [{
  'August 17th 2016': [75]
}, {
  'August 1st 2016': [5]
}, {
  'August 28th 2016': [5]
}]

const replaceOrdinals = o => {
  return Object.keys(o)[0].replace(/\w{2}( \d+$)/, ',$1');
}

dates = dates.sort((a, b) => {
  return Date.parse(replaceOrdinals(a)) - Date.parse(replaceOrdinals(b))
});

console.log(dates);

Keep in mind:

From @adeneo in the comments: Date.parse is implentation dependant. You will probably want to read through it's documentation to determine if things like time zones will mess things up. As a more sure method, you can use something like moment.js for date parsing.