Javascript equivalent to .NET's DateTime.Parse

Question

I'm trying to build a validator that will work with .NET's DefaultModelBinder of using DateTime.Parse to convert a string from the form post to a DateTime. I don't want to have to wait until a date has been posted to the server for it to realize it was a bad date.

Currently jquery.validate uses the following code to validate date fields:

// http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation/Methods/date
date: function(value, element) {
    return this.optional(element) || !/Invalid|NaN/.test(new Date(value));
}

However, due to Javascript's terrible Date parser, this:

275481/69/100089

Will evaluate as valid, to Sep. 12, 275760.

While on the other hand, this:

11-19-2013

Will evaluate as invalid.

Of course, I understand that C#'s DateTime.Parse() takes things like culture (localization) and leap year into account, and I could live with assuming a fixed (US) culture, and allowing "02-29-2013" on the client and kick it out at the server (ideally not, but it's acceptable).

But I can't believe someone hasn't put together a better date validator to work with C#'s DateTime.Parse() logic.

Maybe someone has, I just haven't found it -- which is why I'm posting here.

And I know I have several ways to go about this -- from incredibly simple (less accurate) to incredibly complex (more accurate), but I'm hoping someone has already gone down this road and found the sweet spot.

Answer 1

Datejs seems pretty robust to me. Its parse function supports over 150 cultures:

Date.parse("February 20th 1973")

And in case you need to parse a date string that is not valid in the current culture you can use the parseExact function:

// The Date of 15-Oct-2004
Date.parseExact("10/15/2004", ["M/d/yyyy", "MMMM d, yyyy"]);

Answer 2

In all honesty, your best bet is to perform an AJAX hit, and ask your ASP.net web-server to parse the string and return a Javascript date.

Javascript libraries easily get confused with different locales, e.g.:

GET /ParseDate.ashx?dateStaring=06/01/34 4:53:05 غ.و&locale=ar-SA

Which gets really complicated because:

"6/1/34" = November 19, 2012

The .NET framework, with Windows behind it, has support for a lot of different locales.

Answer 3

Instead of trying to find two Datetime implementations (one for JS and another for C#) that have similar validation and parsing, have you considered having the client 1)use its own library to validate the date and 2)parse and reformat the date to a C# friendly format?

This would allow you to use DateJS to get a very flexible front end for date inputs, make it easier to deal with the client side culture, and let your server side deal with a fixed format.