Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / JavaScript / November 2004

 You are depending upon the browser's default date format to fit your
 script - not a good idea, particularly when you can access the parts of
 the date directly and hence, reliably.

 Try this:

 <script type="text/javascript">
   function iso8601date(){
   var aDate = new Date();
   var dateNum  = aDate.getDate();
   var monthNum = +aDate.getMonth() + 1;  // month range is 0-11
   var yearNum  = aDate.getFullYear();
   alert('date is ' + yearNum
       + '-' + LZ(monthNum)
       + '-' + LZ(dateNum)
       );
   }

   function LZ(x) { return (x<0||x>=10?"":"0") + x }
 </script>

 You may want not want to add leading zeros to single digit months and
 days - it isn't necessary for ISO 8601 compliance but some think it
 looks better.

 LZ() courtesy of an earlier post by Dr John Stockton.

 If you are going to use dates input by the user, then you must do a lot
 of validation on the string that is input and on date ranges -
 different browsers support different ranges (e.g. Safari has a range of
 1900 to 2038, other browsers have much greater ranges) so you must
 validate that the date created from the input is a valid date.

 Search for date posts, you will find plenty of good advice.