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.

Answer 1

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?

Answer 2

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.