RegExp and date from Ajax

[yandhi]

Greetings once again.

I was a little puzzled today when I searched the forums and wasn't able to find my answer. So I decided to post and pick at the available fishbowl of wisdom.

I'm accessing data in SQL via ASP on one page and bringing that data over to my main page via Ajax. One of the pieces of data is a date as a string but there's too much in it so I need to strip some out.

The date is coming over as M/D/YYYY H:MM:SS AM/PM

(note, it's not always MM/DD/YYYY)

I only want to get the month, day, and year to my page and I figured I would just do it in the Javascript.

Would this be a good place for regular expressions? Seems to me that I should be able to get everything before the first space and omit the rest. Is that possible or what would be the best way of going about this particular problem?


Thanks in advance,
John

[zaphod42]

if the space is alway seperating the two parts of the date you could:

function getDate(datestring){
var timeStamp=datestring.split(' ')
return timeStamp[0]
}

there are plenty of ways to go about this in javascript :

var index=datestring.indexOf(' ')
return datestring.substring(0,index)

note that depending on how your string is recieved the (' ') may need to be replaced with ('&nbsp')

also keep in mind that when dealing with strings or arrays in javascript the first character or string is always 0. Using the indexOf method is fun though, if you decide to use regexp with it, remember that if you use the /g (global) switch, you will be returned an array of positions that match your string, while if you don't use it you will be returned the position of only the first match.

[yandhi]

Thanks for the reply!

Your solution worked perfectly. However, I ended up doing the processing in on the vbscript the page that was writing my XML.

I created a function that just gets the part of the date I need. Here is the code I came up with.

function GetDateParts(StringToSearch)
	Dim regEx, CurrentMatch, CurrentMatches
	Set regEx = New RegExp
	regEx.Pattern = "([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{2,4})"
	regEx.IgnoreCase = True
	regEx.Global = True
	regEx.MultiLine = True
	Set CurrentMatches = regEx.Execute(StringToSearch)
	If CurrentMatches.Count >= 1 Then
		Set CurrentMatch = CurrentMatches(0)
		If CurrentMatch.SubMatches.Count >= 1 Then
			Dim year, month, day
			year  = CurrentMatch.SubMatches(2)
			month = CurrentMatch.SubMatches(0)
			day   = CurrentMatch.SubMatches(1)
			GetDateParts = day & "/" & month & "/" & year
		End If
	End If
	Set regEx = Nothing
end function

Basically, just pass the date to the function and it does the rest.

Thanks again for the response. Your assistance is much appreciated.