Character 8206, or \u200E
, it the "left-to-right mark" character. It is used primarily in bidirectional text to indicate that "this part" should be left-to-right.
Depending on the locale, IE may be inserting these marks to ensure that the date is rendered correctly. For instance, if you are on a computer that is set to a right-to-left language, then it may be using these marks to assist in rendering.
While I don't know what's causing it, you should probably be sanitising the input anyway, for example in case of spaces.
<div id="shipdata">
5/12/2014
</div>
The above would cause your code to fail too. So, try this:
jQuery('#shipdata').html().replace(/[^0-9\/]/g,'');