html - Parse Date, Month, and Year from Javascript "Date" form

Question

I am using the following for a user to input a date in a form:

<input name="name" type="date" id="id"/>

I am wondering if there is a way to parse the Day, Month, and Year from this and set them into different variables. I am trying to use only Javascript, not PHP.

The 3 variables would be integers.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Your best option, if you're accepting input and converting it to a date, either split by part or as a Date object, is to simply construct a new Date object by passing it the input value:

var input = document.getElementById( 'id' ).value;
var d = new Date( input );

if ( !!d.valueOf() ) { // Valid date
    year = d.getFullYear();
    month = d.getMonth();
    day = d.getDate();
} else { /* Invalid date */ }

This way you can leverage Dates handling of multiple input formats - it will take YYYY/MM/DD, YYYY-MM-DD, MM/DD/YYYY, even full text dates ( 'October 25, 2013' ), etc. without having you write your own parser. Valid dates are then easily checked by !!d.valueOf() - true if it's good, false if not :)