Javascript Date(dateString) returns NaN on specific server and browser

Question

I'm using the Javascript Date(string) constructor with a date format of "yyyy-mm-dd". The constructor works just fine in IE 9 and Firefox unless the app is running on our testing VM which is running IIS. If it's on the VM, in IE 9 it returns 'NaN', but still works normally in Firefox.

    var dateAsString = "2011-11-09";
    var dateCreated = new Date(dateAsString);

I was under the assumption that the server had nothing to do with client-side Javascript. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

And for those of us who want to know how to replace hyphens (aka dashes) with slashes:

new Date(dashToSlash(string));

That uses this function:

function dashToSlash(string){
  var response = string.replace(/-/g,"/");
  //The slash-g bit says: do this more than once
  return response;
}

In my case it's much easier to convert hyphens to slashes selectively (only where it's needed for the Date() function) than to replace the date format everywhere in my code.

Note: you really need to define a separate 'response' variable and assign it the value of the replace operation result. If you don't, the string is returned unaltered in Chrome. That's not a huge problem, since Chrome doesn't have a problem with hyphenated date strings to begin with. But still...

Answer 2

Just use slashes instead of hyphens if you can.

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EDIT: Expanded clarification...

The ISO 8601 standard format uses the hyphen as a date separator. My answer does not mean you do not need to follow standards. You can use slashes only for the Date constructor if necessary.