Using jQuery tablesorter to sort mm/yy dates

Question

I am using the jquery tablesorter plugin to sort a table. On of my the columns in my table shows the date in mm/yy format.

<tr>
    <td class="col-name">...</td>
    ...
    <td rel="2000" class="col-dob">10/00</td>
    ...
</tr>
<tr>
    <td class="col-name">...</td>
    ...
    <td rel="1986" class="col-dob">11/86</td>
    ...
</tr>

Note:

• Each cell has a unique class
• Date is displayed in the mm/yy format
• Cell with date receives the year as well

My jQuery code is as below:

// add parser through the tablesorter addParser method
$.tablesorter.addParser({
        // set a unique id
        id: 'user-birthdate',
        is: function(s) {
                // return false so this parser is not auto detected
                return false;
        },
        format: function(s) {
                // format your data for normalization

                var dateSplit = s.split('/');

                if(2 !== dateSplit.length)
                        return 0;

                return new Date(dateSplit[1], dateSplit[0], 1);
        },
        // set type, either numeric or text
        type: 'numeric'
});

myClass.init = function() {
        $('.module .user table').tablesorter({
                sortList: [[0,0]],     
             widgets: ['zebra'],
                headers: {
                        5: {
                                sorter:'user-birthdate'
                        }
                }
        });
}

myClass.init();

My problem is that the tableSorter interprets 00 as year 1900 instead of 2000 and hence the sorted data is not correct.

Any clue how can I resolve this? I am using jQuery 1.2.6 and the latest version of tablesorter.

Answer 1

The tablesorter documentation is often rather unhelpful, I've found. It looks like it says a lot, but is lacking in the details.

In this case, it doesn't tell you the function signature for a parser. Fortunately, you can read the unminified code to find it.

There we find that the metadata parser does this:

format: function(s,table,cell) {

This means that you can adjust your format method to:

format: function(s, table, cell) {
    // format your data for normalization

    var dateSplit = s.split('/');
    var year = $(cell).attr('rel');

    if(2 !== dateSplit.length)
        return 0;

    return new Date(year, dateSplit[0], 1);
},

Or at least similar to that. I haven't actually tested this. But it should be at least very close.

Answer 2

I think you will find that your problem is the Date constructor and the 2-digit year string you are passing without disambiguation: new Date(dateSplit[1], dateSplit[0], 1);

I don't think you can (easily) get access to rel based on s in the parser. Does s contain the entire contents of the cell? Can you do something in the data in the cell like: <span style="display : none">CC</span>MM/YY, strip out the tags and then combine CC with YY in your parse?