new Date() using Javascript in Safari

Question

I'm having an issue using the new Date() function in Javascript. Safari is giving me an "Invalid Date" message.

I've created a short example at jsbin.

This appears to work on all other browsers, but not Safari. Any ideas on how I can take the value from an input (such as 2011-01-03) and turn it into a date object, while having it work properly in Safari?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

The date parsing behavior on JavaScript is implementation-dependent, the ISO8601 format was recently added to the ECMAScript 5th Edition Specification, but this is not yet supported by all implementations.

I would recommend you to parse it manually, for example:

function parseDate(input) {
  var parts = input.match(/(\d+)/g);
  return new Date(parts[0], parts[1]-1, parts[2]);
}

parseDate('2011-01-03'); // Mon Jan 03 2011 00:00:00

Basically the above function matches each date part and uses the Date constructor, to build a date object, note that the months argument needs to be 0-based (0=Jan, 1=Feb,...11=Dec).