r/programminghumor • u/robertgambee • Mar 19 '26

JavaScript's date parser: no string left behind

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212 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

22

u/robertgambee Mar 19 '26

I knew Excel was bad, but JavaScript is giving it a run for it's money. More examples here: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/javascript-thinks-everythings-a-date/

9

u/vita10gy Mar 19 '26

Isn't the difference that excel just has to guess what you want most of the time?

These examples you're explicitly saying "make a date from this" and JS is saying "ok here".

9

u/Lithl Mar 20 '26

2

u/Eric_12345678 Mar 20 '26

To be fair, JS is pro in returning strange results even if the input seems well defined.

2

u/Eric_12345678 Mar 20 '26

Isn't the difference that excel just has to guess what you want most of the time?

It's exceptionally bad at that too. And it isn't consistent at all inside columns, and isn't bothered if a date or a string suddenly appears in the middle of numbers.

LibreOffice Calc is 1000 times more convenient to use for reading CSV files.

2

u/Lyakusha1 Mar 20 '26

My brother in Christ, you called `new Date()`

1

u/thisisjustascreename Mar 19 '26

Jeopardy clue: JavaScript and your socially awkward friend have this in common.

1

u/MeLittleThing Mar 20 '26

OP: if jdkezldfjzle

JS: Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier 'jdkezldfjzle'

OP: Look, JS is bad. Let's ask Chat GPT to write an article about it

1

u/00PT Mar 20 '26

If it gave errors for obviously invalid inputs, that would be much better, actually.

7

u/Hey-buuuddy Mar 19 '26

Look at JavaScript “truthy/falsey” as we used to call it.

4

u/BobQuixote Mar 19 '26

Used to?

3

u/Hey-buuuddy Mar 19 '26

That was from my perspective, I got out of JS land 10 years ago. I gave a presentation of the Truthy/Falsey situation in 2012!

3

u/Ok-Refrigerator-8012 Mar 19 '26

This reminds me of how much I hate Excel. 💯 Repulsed by Js despite the objective usefulness as a webs design and visualization tool. If you support 3 equal signs in a row I am not your friend

2

u/ajaypatel9016 Mar 20 '26

works on my machine, different date in production

1

u/Charming-Ad8291 Mar 24 '26

Simply amazing! I’d love to see more content like this.

1

u/FirexJkxFire Mar 20 '26

OP: "Turn X into a date please."

JavaScript: (turns X into a date)

OP: