Question

Please correct or explain how my over-simplification is incorrect as I am not a JavaScript expert.

But I just need to know if an object is a valid date. This will only come from user input (ie, text box).

var is_valid_date = function(date) {
    try {
        var d = new Date(date);
        return true;
    }
    catch(e) {
        return false;
    }
}

Answer 1

YOU have to decide what form of dates you want to accept.

Then, once you know what forms you want to accept, you can then check the spec for new Date(str) or date.parse() on MDN and see if it supports exactly what you want and if it does the right things on error conditions (it probably will not). If not, then you will have to do some manual parsing.

If you want further help from us, you will need to specify what forms of date you want to accept.

There are also some browser differences as javascript has moved to support additional date formats and earlier browsers had some inconstencies between them which all means you’ll want to build yourself a simple test script with a bunch of legal and illegal date format strings and see if your validity detection does what you want in several browsers. This isn’t rocket science to get it right, but it’s not trivial either and requires some work unless you only want to accept what the original date object supported (which is unlikely).

If this were my code, I’d probably decide that it’s far less work to do manual parsing of your desired input format that you know with 100% certainty will work in all browsers because it’s your own manual parsing. I’d probably use a regex to parse the date and then convert each component to a number and check each component for validity. You can then feed those numeric components to the Date constructor to create the Date object.

If you can tell by now, the built-in date class isn’t very useful for user entered input. If you’re willing to use a library for this, the date.js library has a ton of useful functionality in this regard.

Here’s an example of a manual parsing function that accepts these US formats:

mm-dd-yyyy
mm dd yyyy
mm/dd/yyyy

JS Code:

function checkDate(str) {
    var matches = str.match(/(\d{1,2})[- \/](\d{1,2})[- \/](\d{4})/);
    if (!matches) return;

    // parse each piece and see if it makes a valid date object
    var month = parseInt(matches[1], 10);
    var day = parseInt(matches[2], 10);
    var year = parseInt(matches[3], 10);
    var date = new Date(year, month - 1, day);
    if (!date || !date.getTime()) return;

    // make sure we have no funny rollovers that the date object sometimes accepts
    // month > 12, day > what's allowed for the month
    if (date.getMonth() + 1 != month ||
        date.getFullYear() != year ||
        date.getDate() != day) {
            return;
        }
    return(date);
}

And a demo with some test cases: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/xZmBY/

If you want the Euro format, it’s a trivial matter to switch the code to that. In either case, you have to decide which format you accept, code for it and then communicate to the user which format is required. If you think this is messy, then perhaps you will see why so many sites use a date calendar picker that doesn’t have this complexity.