Sort date/times enclosed in time elements

Sort date/times enclosed in time elements

rink_attendant_6rink_attendant_6 Posts: 16Questions: 4Answers: 1
edited November 2013 in General
Related issue: http://www.datatables.net/forums/discussion/12953/sort-table-by-html5-data-value/p1

Many tables have columns of date/time values and it would be nice to sort these based on the datetime attribute of the HTML5 time element. I think it might be more efficient as well to do this than to do string parsing.

Here's a simple example: http://jsfiddle.net/J4Mxz/

The sorting of the second and third columns should be the exact same since they both have the same values, but the second column is being treated as a string instead of a date.

I realize that there is already a way to do this by defining my own sort function by adding a property to $.fn.dataTableExt.oSort, but it seems inefficient. I also tried forcing the column sType to be "date" but I guess the HTML tags get in the way.
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