Question

I’m using the datatable jQuery plugin; it works fine when sorting columns that contain text and numbers, but I have an issue with sorting columns that contain date values.

For example when I click on the date column I get:

01-03-2012
27-02-2012
29-02-2012
...
...

However the real order should be like this:

01-03-2012
29-02-2012
27-02-2012

NB: I’m using the French date format d-m-Y.

Answer 1

Did you look at the Sorting plug-ins page?

The following is copied directly from that page. You might have to tweak the code a bit (for example, splitting on - rather than /, etc.) but most of the work is done for you:

Date (dd/mm/YY)

DataTables internal date sorting replies on Date.parse() which is part
of the Javascript language, but you may wish to sort on dates which is
doesn’t recognise. The following is a plug-in for sorting dates in the
format dd/mm/yy. Note a type detection plug-in is provided to
automatically select this type of sorting when needed.

jQuery.fn.dataTableExt.oSort['uk_date-asc']  = function(a,b) {
    var ukDatea = a.split('/');
    var ukDateb = b.split('/');

    var x = (ukDatea[2] + ukDatea[1] + ukDatea[0]) * 1;
    var y = (ukDateb[2] + ukDateb[1] + ukDateb[0]) * 1;

    return ((x < y) ? -1 : ((x > y) ?  1 : 0));
};

jQuery.fn.dataTableExt.oSort['uk_date-desc'] = function(a,b) {
    var ukDatea = a.split('/');
    var ukDateb = b.split('/');

    var x = (ukDatea[2] + ukDatea[1] + ukDatea[0]) * 1;
    var y = (ukDateb[2] + ukDateb[1] + ukDateb[0]) * 1;

    return ((x < y) ? 1 : ((x > y) ?  -1 : 0));
};