Javascript Date() constructor doesn't work

Question

I have an issue -

The javascript Date("mm-dd-yyyy") constructor doesn't work for FF. It works fine for IE.

• IE : new Date("04-02-2008") => "Wed Apr 2 00:00:00 EDT 2008"
• FF2 : new Date("04-02-2008") => Invalid Date

So lets try another constructor. Trying this constructor Date("yyyy", "mm", "dd")

• IE : new Date("2008", "04", "02"); => "Fri May 2 00:00:00 EDT 2008"
• FF : new Date("2008", "04", "02"); => "Fri May 2 00:00:00 EDT 2008"
• IE : new Date("2008", "03", "02"); => "Wed Apr 2 00:00:00 EDT 2008"
• FF : new Date("2008", "03", "02"); => "Wed Apr 2 00:00:00 EDT 2008"

So the Date("yyyy", "mm", "dd") constructor uses an index of 0 to represent January.

Has anyone dealt with this?
There must be a better way than subtracting 1 from the months.

Answer 1

It is the definition of the Date object to use values 0-11 for the month field.

I believe that the constructor using a String is system-dependent (not to mention locale/timezone dependent) so you are probably better off using the constructor where you specify year/month/day as seperate parameters.

BTW, in Firefox,

new Date("04/02/2008");

works fine for me - it will interpret slashes, but not hyphens. I think this proves my point that using a String to construct a Date object is problemsome. Use explicit values for month/day/year instead:

new Date(2008, 3, 2);