Question

I’m talking about ones encoded in the format in which the twitter API returns its dates, like…

"Tue Jan 12 21:33:28 +0000 2010"

The best thing I thought of was to try to slice it up with regexes to become something more like…

20100112213328,

but there’s got to be a better way.

Answer 1

JavaScript Date will correctly parse the Twitter date :

  var d1 = new Date ("Tue Jan 12 21:33:28 +0000 2010")
    , d2 = new Date ("Tue Jan 12 22:33:28 +0000 2010");

The you can compare these using the getTime method which converts to numeric form:

  if (d1.getTime() < d2.getTime())
  {
       //...
  }

Or, simply

if (d1 < d2)
{
}

If needs must, explicitly coerce to number:

if (+(d1) < +(d2))
{
}