Question

I am using a Jquery plugin called datatables

Its fantastic, however I cannot get the dates to sort correctly according to the dd/mm/yyyy format.

I have looked at their support formats but none of these fixes seem to work.

Can anybody here help me please?

Answer 1

Update 2020: HTML Solution

Since HTML 5 is so much developed and almost all major browser supporting it. So now a much cleaner approach is to use HTML5 data attributes (maxx777 provided a PHP solution I am using the simple HTML). For non-numeric data as in our scenario, we can use data-sort or data-order attribute and assign a sortable value to it.

HTML

<td data-sort='YYYYMMDD'>DD/MM/YYYY</td>

Here is working HTML solution

jQuery Solution

Here is working jQuery solution.

jQuery.extend( jQuery.fn.dataTableExt.oSort, {
"date-uk-pre": function ( a ) {
    var ukDatea = a.split('/');
    return (ukDatea[2] + ukDatea[1] + ukDatea[0]) * 1;
},

"date-uk-asc": function ( a, b ) {
    return ((a < b) ? -1 : ((a > b) ? 1 : 0));
},

"date-uk-desc": function ( a, b ) {
    return ((a < b) ? 1 : ((a > b) ? -1 : 0));
}
} );
 

Add the above code to script and set the specific column with Date values with { "sType": "date-uk" } and others as null, see below:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#example').dataTable( {
        "aoColumns": [
            null,
            null,
            null,
            null,
            { "sType": "date-uk" },
            null
        ]
    });
    });