Question

im trying to write a parser for the jquery tablesorter plugin and i really need a hand on this… i got this date format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss a.m.|p.m. and i cant make a proper regex to use javascript .match function… , here’s the code i got:

      $.tablesorter.addParser({
            id: 'DateParser',
            is: function(s) {
                    return false;
            },
            format: function(s) {
                    var date = s.match(/^(\d{1,2})-(\d{1,2})-(\d{4}) :(\d{1,2}):(\d{1,2})$/)
                    var d = date[1];
                    var m = date[2];
                    var y = date[3];
                    var H = date[4];
                    var M = date[5];
                    var S = date[6];
                    var MS = 0;

                    return new Date(y, m, d, H, M, S, MS).getTime();
            },
            type: 'numeric'
    });
    $("#tabletosort").tablesorter({
            headers: {
                    0: {
                            sorter: 'DateParser'
                    }
            }
    });

the result of the match() call is always null… thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

Your current regex is matching dates in the form dd-mm-yyyy :mm:ss – you’ve missed out the hours, the am/pm, and used - instead of /, so that’s why it’s not ever matching dates formatted with dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss a.m.|p.m.. Correcting those issues gives you something like the following:

/^(\d{1,2})\/(\d{1,2})\/(\d{4}) (\d{1,2}):(\d\d):(\d\d) (a\.m\.|p\.m\.)$/

…and then you’d test the last sub-expression to adjust the hours for am or pm.

(Note: I don’t think you want the minutes and seconds to allow single digits, so I’ve changed that part to require two digits.)