Question

 alert(new Date('2010-11-29'));

chrome, ff doesn’t have problems with this, but safari cries “invalid date”. Why ?

edit : ok, as per the comments below, I used string parsing and tried this :

alert(new Date('11-29-2010')); //doesn't work in safari
alert(new Date('29-11-2010')); //doesn't work in safari
alert(new Date('2010-29-11')); //doesn't work in safari

edit Mar 22 2018 : Seems like people are still landing here – Today, I would use moment or date-fns and be done with it. Date-fns is very much pain free and light as well.

Answer 1

The pattern yyyy-MM-dd isn’t an officially supported format for Date constructor. Firefox seems to support it, but don’t count on other browsers doing the same.

Here are some supported strings:

• MM-dd-yyyy
• yyyy/MM/dd
• MM/dd/yyyy
• MMMM dd, yyyy
• MMM dd, yyyy

DateJS seems like a good library for parsing non standard date formats.

Edit: just checked ECMA-262 standard. Quoting from section 15.9.1.15:

Date Time String Format

ECMAScript defines a string
interchange format for date-times
based upon a simplification of the ISO
8601 Extended Format. The format is
as follows: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ
Where the fields are as follows:

• YYYY is the decimal digits of the year in the Gregorian calendar.
• "-" (hyphon) appears literally twice in the string.
• MM is the month of the year from 01 (January) to 12 (December).
• DD is the day of the month from 01 to 31.
• "T" appears literally in the string, to indicate the beginning of
  the time element.
• HH is the number of complete hours that have passed since midnight as two
  decimal digits.
• ":" (colon) appears literally twice in the string.
• mm is the number of complete minutes since the start of the hour as
  two decimal digits.
• ss is the number of complete seconds since the start of the minute
  as two decimal digits.
• "." (dot) appears literally in the string.
• sss is the number of complete milliseconds since the start of the
  second as three decimal digits. Both
  the "." and the milliseconds field may
  be omitted.
• Z is the time zone offset specified as "Z" (for UTC) or either "+" or "-"
  followed by a time expression hh:mm

This format includes date-only forms:

• YYYY
• YYYY-MM
• YYYY-MM-DD

It also includes time-only forms with
an optional time zone offset appended:

• THH:mm
• THH:mm:ss
• THH:mm:ss.sss

Also included are "date-times" which
may be any combination of the above.

So, it seems that YYYY-MM-DD is included in the standard, but for some reason, Safari doesn’t support it.

Update: after looking at datejs documentation, using it, your problem should be solved using code like this:

var myDate1 = Date.parseExact("29-11-2010", "dd-MM-yyyy");
var myDate2 = Date.parseExact("11-29-2010", "MM-dd-yyyy");
var myDate3 = Date.parseExact("2010-11-29", "yyyy-MM-dd");
var myDate4 = Date.parseExact("2010-29-11", "yyyy-dd-MM");