JavaScript date objects UK dates

Question

I have the following code

 datePicker.change(function(){
        dateSet = datePicker.val();
        dateMinimum = dateChange();
        dateSetD = new Date(dateSet);
        dateMinimumD = new Date(dateMinimum);
        if(dateSetD<dateMinimumD){
            datePicker.val(dateMinimum);
            alert('You can not amend down due dates');
        }       
    })

dateSet = "01/07/2010" dateMinimum = "23/7/2010"

Both are UK format. When the date objects are compared dateSetD should be less than dateMinimumD but it is not. I think it is to do with the facts I am using UK dates dd/mm/yyyy. What would I need to change to get this working?

Answer 1

The JavaScript Date constructor doesn't parse strings in that form (whether in UK or U.S. format). See the spec for details, but you can construct the dates part by part:

new Date(year, month, day);

MomentJS might be useful for dealing with dates flexibly. (This answer previously linked to this lib, but it's not been maintained in a long time.)

Answer 2

This is how I ended up doing it:

 var lastRunDateString ='05/04/2012'; \\5th april 2012
 var lastRunDate = new Date(lastRunDateString.split('/')[2], lastRunDateString.split('/')[1] - 1, lastRunDateString.split('/')[0]);

Note the month indexing is from 0-11.