Question

I know there are loads of questions on here about changing the datepicker dateFormat, but i’m following the instructions exactly and they seem to have no effect. Here is the exact code that was suggested on other answers:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#datepicker').datepicker({ dateFormat: 'dd-mm-yy' });
});

Yet when I run it, and test the datepicker value with alert($('#datepicker').datepicker("getDate"));

I get the date back in the undesired format! This is extremely confusing. Am I something wrong? See the described behaviour at http://jsfiddle.net/TmdM8/

edit: even more confusing is that if I read the dateformat using alert($("#datepicker").datepicker('option', 'dateFormat'));

… the returned dateFormat is correct, even though calling getDate does not return the date in the desired format. See http://jsfiddle.net/fWmBe/

Answer 1

the date format setting is for what the format looks like when it’s show in the text box the picker is applied to.

have a look at my updated version of your fiddle:

http://jsfiddle.net/TmdM8/1/

as you can see, when you pcick in the text box, and pick a date, it is in the format you have specified.
as far as i know, the getDate function returns a javascript date.

EDIT:
if you wanted to format the output from the javascript date, you’ll need to use a custom script, or a library like date.js (i’ve had great success with this).

http://code.google.com/p/datejs/

with that you could do something like :

$('#datepicker').datepicker("getDate").toString('dd-MM-yyyy');

to get your date in the format you like