Jquery Tablesorter Plugin

[Guest FirefoxRocks]

This plugin is awesome: http://tablesorter.com/docs/Here is the description for it:

Introduction tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell. It has many useful features including:

• Multi-column sorting
• Parsers for sorting text, URIs, integers, currency, floats, IP addresses, dates (ISO, long and short formats), time. Add your own easily
• Support for ROWSPAN and COLSPAN on TH elements
• Support secondary "hidden" sorting (e.g., maintain alphabetical sort when sorting on other criteria)
• Extensibility via widget system
• Cross-browser: IE 6.0+, FF 2+, Safari 2.0+, Opera 9.0+
• Small code size

However I have a problem here. It doesn't explain how you can use the "parsers for sorting text, URIs, integers, ...". An example of how to invoke the parser is here: http://tablesorter.com/docs/example-meta-parsers.html, but I don't know where the parsers actually take place in the JavaScript (the names of them).I have a table with a column of dates in the format <?php date("j/M/Y"); ?> and it would be great if I could sort it properly.

[justsomeguy]

Just from looking at the example, I would imagine they do that in the class:

	<thead>> 		<tr> 			<th class="{sorter: 'text'}">first name</th> 			<th>last name</th> 			<th>age</th> 			<th>total</th> 			<th class="{sorter: 'procent'}">discount</th> 			<th>date</th> 		</tr> 	</thead>

[Guest FirefoxRocks]

I tried that but the parser was still A-Z/0-9 (text/mixed/numbers), not dates. Even if I use a month name like "August" it still doesn't sort according to date.

[justsomeguy]

They have several examples showing dates that all work. They also have an example of writing your own parser to use for a certain column. You can see all of the normal parsers defined in the tablesorter.js file, it has 3 or 4 different date parsers for various types of dates.

[Guest FirefoxRocks]

I finally figured out that if I don't use ISO dates, I have to use the US Long Date format, which was found in MSDN. But since that was too long, I dropped the weekday and forced the parser to use usLongDate.That took a while.