Question

I am trying to sort a two-dimensional array by a timestamp column Descending. This collumn (index 11) is in the format: ‘yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss’. I have tried multiple things. According to the topics I’ve read, this code should work:

 List.sort(function(x, y){
     return Date.parse(y[11]) - Date.parse(x[11]);
});

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

That will work on up-to-date browsers that support the only-recently-defined input format for Date.parse (prior to ES5, it was just “parse whatever Date#toString spits out”).

Although never spec’d, older browsers will support it with / rather than - in the date, so:

List.sort(function(x, y){
     return Date.parse(y[11].replace(/-/g, '/')) - Date.parse(x[11].replace(/-/g, '/'));
});

Always test on your target browsers, of course, because again this was never specified.

For example, on IE8 and earlier:

display(Date.parse("2012-06-01 14:22:17"));

…is NaN, but:

display(Date.parse("2012/06/01 14:22:17"));

…is 1338556937000.