DateFormatting Error - actionscript-3

Question

I was trying to convert this format of String to Date and was unsuccessfull
"23-DEC-2008" to a Date Object ,it looks like its not accepting "-" and i could see NULL in the date object after formatting .
Can somebody let me know if u have come across this problem .
Thanks ,
Sudeep

Answer 1

The "-" shouldn't be an issue. I've converted SQL timestamp strings to Date objects with no problem (the format of SQL date strings is YYYY-MM-DD). What is the format string you're using? Try using the format string "DD-MMM-YYYY" and see if that works.
Edit
Sorry, my solution only applies to the DateFormatter class from Flex, and not Actionscript. After looking at the documentation for the Actionscript Date class I saw the following:
The year month and day terms can be separated by a forward slash (/) or by spaces, but never by a dash (-). (1)
If you're stuck using straight Actionscript, it looks as if you'll have to write your own parse method that accepts the "-".

Answer 2

this sort of works ...
public function parse(source:String):Date {
var ret:Date = new Date(0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0);
var parts:Array = source.split("-");
ret.fullYear = Number(parts[2]);
ret.setDate(Number(parts[0]));
var month:int = "jan,feb,mar,apr,may,jun,jul,aug,sep,oct,now,dec".split(",").indexOf(String(parts[1]).toLowerCase());
if (month == -1) throw "could not parse month";
ret.setMonth(month);
return ret;
}
but really, i don't like it ... if 'DEC' were 'Dec' , then
Date.parse("23-Dec-2008".split("-").join(" "))
would work ... but still ... i think, you should get something more robust ...
greetz
back2dos