Regular Expression to validate a timestamp

Question

I need a regular expression to validate a timestamp of the format, using Javascript:

YYYY/MM/DD HH:MI:SS

I tried cooking up a few, but seems my regex skills fail to cover something or other.

Please give me a reference or way to do it.

P.S. : I mention regex, only as a suggestion. Im using Javascript and welcome any alternative.

Answer 1

I would recommend to use Datejs for this. Parsing the date yourself is not necessary and a Regex is not enough to validate a timestamp. With datejs you could parse the string in a date and you'll get null if its invalid:

Date.parse("2009/06/29 13:30:10", "yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss");

Answer 2

If you just want to validate the syntax, here is the POSIX regex:

[0-9]{1,4}/[0-9]{1,2}/[0-9]{1,2} [0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{1,2}

But if you want to check the semantics, I would process the string using your language of choice, there are too many cases you cannot cover with regular expressions (like leap years/seconds, daylight savings, etc)