How to get date separator?

Question

JavaScript

How to determine date separator if possible separators are '.', '/', '-' ? The time separator is always ':' so we skip it.
I'm currently using split to split the string and check it 3 times for each of the above characters. I would like to know if this can be done in one step? If so, how?)

Answer 1

The separator is the first non-numeric character. So . str.match(/\D/)[0]

Answer 2

Often it is enough just to feed the string into new Date() or Date.parse() it takes as input with different delimiters.
If you know the format, you can use moment.js , the format is specified there.
Example:

moment("2010-10-20 4:30",       "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm");   // parsed as 4:30 local time
moment("2010-10-20 4:30 +0000", "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm Z"); // parsed as 4:30 UTC

You can do replace(/[.\/]/, '-') and cast everything to hyphens.
If the format is unknown, then it is easy to make a mistake with the date, imagine the sixth of July 2008 recorded in a different order.

'2008/07/06',
  '07-06-2008',
  '06-07-2008',
  '07/06/08',
  '06/07/08',
  '07/06/08',
  '06/07/08',
  '08/06/07',

how do you tell them apart without knowing the format?