Question

I am trying to use Jquery Table sorter plugin latest available. http://mottie.github.com/tablesorter/docs/#Demo

The issue is I have a table column with Date format and also it contains an email value. I am trying to extract the date value and sort it based on date value.

Since I am using latest version of Table sorter I tried to use the parser class name available in the latest(http://mottie.github.com/tablesorter/docs/example-parsers-class-name.html) .

Please find my fiddle below.

http://jsfiddle.net/meetravi/pztqe/8/

Code Snippet:

      <tr>
        <th>Name</th>
        <th>Major</th>
        <th>Sex</th>
        <th>English</th>
        <th>Japanese</th>
        <th>Calculus</th>
        <th>Geometry</th>
        <th class="sorter-shortDate">Date</th>
      </tr>
      <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td>Student01</td>
        <td>Languages</td>
        <td>male</td>
        <td>80</td>
        <td>70</td>
        <td>75</td>
        <td>80</td>
        <td><em>11/01/12 11:42</em><spanclass="label">[e-mail]</span></td>
    </tr>
    </tbody>

<script type="text/javascript">
   $(document).ready(function(){
     $('#table-Id').tablesorter({
            theme: 'blue',
            dateFormat : "ddmmyy",
            textExtraction: {
                7: function(node, table, cellIndex) {
                    return $(node).find("em").text();
                }
            }
        });


});


</script>

Answer 1

First off, there should be a space between the span and class.

Second, the date parser is only set up to work with 4-digit years ddmmyyyy. See this issue to get a parser that works with 2-digit years, but please read everything to see how IE behaves with 2-digit years.

<td><em>11/01/2012 11:42</em><span class="label">[e-mail]</span></td>

Third, because of the content of the date column, you’ll need to set the sorter option in the header:

headers: {
    7: { sorter: 'shortDate' }
}

And lastly, there were two textExtraction options in the demo. The second one, not the one you posted above, was overriding the function. The one you wrote works perfectly 🙂

Here is a demo of the above mentioned changes.

---

Update: Here’s an updated demo using the following parser code:

$.tablesorter.addParser({
    id: "ddmmyy",
    is: function(s) {
        return false;
    },
    format: function(s, table, cell, cellIndex) {
        s = s
            // replace separators
            .replace(/\s+/g," ").replace(/[\-|\.|\,]/g, "/")
            // reformat dd/mm/yy to mm/dd/yy
            .replace(/(\d{1,2})[\/\s](\d{1,2})[\/\s](\d{2})/, "$2/$1/$3");
        var d = new Date(s), y = d.getFullYear();
        // if date > 50 years old, add 100 years
        // this will work when people start using "70" and mean "2070"
        if (new Date().getFullYear() - y > 50) {
            d.setFullYear( y + 100 );
        }
        return d.getTime();
    },
    type: "numeric"
});