Safari's Date Parsing Quirks

Why does Safari throw an "invalid date" error when encountering dates in formats like '2010-11-29', while other browsers handle these dates without issue? This inconsistent behavior can be frustrating for web developers.

The root of the problem lies in Safari's interpretation of the dashes (-) in the date strings. While most browsers recognize dashes as date separators, Safari mistakenly treats them as part of the date itself, leading to incorrect date calculations.

To illustrate, try the following string parsing attempts:

alert(new Date('2010-29-11')); // Doesn't work in Safari
alert(new Date('29-11-2010')); // Doesn't work in Safari
alert(new Date('11-29-2010')); // Doesn't work in Safari

As you can see, Safari fails to parse these dates correctly, regardless of the order of the components.

While utilizing a separate library like Moment.js or date-fns might be an option to alleviate this issue, a more straightforward solution is available. By simply replacing the dashes with slashes (/), Safari can correctly interpret the date string:

console.log(new Date('2011-04-12'.replace(/-/g, "/")));

This one-line fix ensures that Safari can parse dates in the expected format, allowing web applications to display and manipulate dates consistently across multiple browsers.