Parse date in IE

Question

I have the following date format:

Tue Mar 06 17:45:35 -0600 2012

and I want to parse it using new Date() in Javascript.

Fortunately this works in Chrome but does not work in IE (returns invalid date).

Any suggestions?

Tried to use:

/**Parses string formatted as YYYY-MM-DD to a Date object.
* If the supplied string does not match the format, an 
* invalid Date (value NaN) is returned.
* @param {string} dateStringInRange format YYYY-MM-DD, with year in
* range of 0000-9999, inclusive.
* @return {Date} Date object representing the string.
*/
function parseISO8601(dateStringInRange) {
    var isoExp = /^\s*(\d{4})-(\d\d)-(\d\d)\s*$/,
        date = new Date(NaN), month,
        parts = isoExp.exec(dateStringInRange);

    if (parts) {
        month = +parts[2];
        date.setFullYear(parts[1], month - 1, parts[3]);
        if (month != date.getMonth() + 1) {
            date.setTime(NaN);
        }
    }
    return date;
}

Answer 1

In ECMA-262 ed 3, Date.parse was entirely implementation dependent. In ES5, only ISO8601 strings should be correctly parsed, anything else is up to the implementation.

Here's a manual parse of the OP format:

 var s = 'Tue Mar 06 17:45:35 -0600 2012'

 function parseIt(s) {

   var months = {Jan:0, Feb:1, Mar:2, Apr:3, May:4, Jun:5, 
                 Jul:6, Aug:7, Sep:8, Oct:9, Nov:10, Dec:11};

   // Split the string up 
   var s = s.split(/[\s:]/);

   // Create a date object, setting the date                
   var d = new Date(s[7], months[s[1]], s[2]);

   // Set the time
   d.setHours(s[3], s[4], s[5], 0);

   // Correct the timezone
   d.setMinutes(d.getMinutes() + Number(s[6]) - d.getTimezoneOffset());

   // Done 
   return d;
 }

 alert(s + '\n' + parseIt(s));

Edit

The signs in the timezone line were originally wrong, they're correct now. Oh, and I'm assuming the '-0600' is a javascript timezone offset equivalent to GMT+1000 (e.g. AEST).