How to validate date with format "mm/dd/yyyy" in JavaScript?

Question

I think Niklas has the right answer to your problem. Besides that, I think the following date validation function is a little bit easier to read:

// Validates that the input string is a valid date formatted as "mm/dd/yyyy"
function isValidDate(dateString)
{
    // First check for the pattern
    if(!/^\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{4}$/.test(dateString))
        return false;

    // Parse the date parts to integers
    var parts = dateString.split("/");
    var day = parseInt(parts[1], 10);
    var month = parseInt(parts[0], 10);
    var year = parseInt(parts[2], 10);

    // Check the ranges of month and year
    if(year < 1000 || year > 3000 || month == 0 || month > 12)
        return false;

    var monthLength = [ 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31 ];

    // Adjust for leap years
    if(year % 400 == 0 || (year % 100 != 0 && year % 4 == 0))
        monthLength[1] = 29;

    // Check the range of the day
    return day > 0 && day <= monthLength[month - 1];
};

I would use Moment.js for date validation.

alert(moment("05/22/2012", 'MM/DD/YYYY',true).isValid()); //true

Jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/q8y9nbu5/

true value is for strict parsing credit to @Andrey Prokhorov which means

you may specify a boolean for the last argument to make Moment use strict parsing. Strict parsing requires that the format and input match exactly, including delimeters.

Use the following regular expression to validate:

var date_regex = /^(0[1-9]|1[0-2])\/(0[1-9]|1\d|2\d|3[01])\/(19|20)\d{2}$/;
if (!(date_regex.test(testDate))) {
    return false;
}

This is working for me for MM/dd/yyyy.

All credits go to elian-ebbing

Just for the lazy ones here I also provide a customized version of the function for the format yyyy-mm-dd.

function isValidDate(dateString)
{
    // First check for the pattern
    var regex_date = /^\d{4}\-\d{1,2}\-\d{1,2}$/;

    if(!regex_date.test(dateString))
    {
        return false;
    }

    // Parse the date parts to integers
    var parts   = dateString.split("-");
    var day     = parseInt(parts[2], 10);
    var month   = parseInt(parts[1], 10);
    var year    = parseInt(parts[0], 10);

    // Check the ranges of month and year
    if(year < 1000 || year > 3000 || month == 0 || month > 12)
    {
        return false;
    }

    var monthLength = [ 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31 ];

    // Adjust for leap years
    if(year % 400 == 0 || (year % 100 != 0 && year % 4 == 0))
    {
        monthLength[1] = 29;
    }

    // Check the range of the day
    return day > 0 && day <= monthLength[month - 1];
}