Detecting an “invalid date” Date instance in JavaScript

I’d like to tell the difference between valid and invalid date objects in JS, but couldn’t figure out how:

var d = new Date("foo");
console.log(d.toString()); // shows 'Invalid Date'
console.log(typeof d); // shows 'object'
console.log(d instanceof Date); // shows 'true'

Any ideas for writing an isValidDate function?

  • Ash recommended Date.parse for parsing date strings, which gives an authoritative way to check if the date string is valid.
  • What I would prefer, if possible, is have my API accept a Date instance and to be able to check/assert whether it’s valid or not. Borgar’s solution does that, but I need to test it across browsers. I also wonder whether there’s a more elegant way.
  • Ash made me consider not having my API accept Date instances at all, this would be easiest to validate.
  • Borgar suggested testing for a Date instance, and then testing for the Date‘s time value. If the date is invalid, the time value is NaN. I checked with ECMA-262 and this behavior is in the standard, which is exactly what I’m looking for.

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