atk/LICENSE.txt

nice work! i wonder if the 140bytes wizards can golf enough room in for Date.parse=Date.parse||... or timezones.

This should get you the polyfill in 139 bytes:

Date.parse=Date.parse||function(a){a=a.split(/[ :]\D?/);return Date(a[3],0|"anebarapayunulugepctovec".indexOf(a[1])/2,a[2],a[4],a[5],a[6])}

@eliperelman : Date without "new" returns the current date for me.
@jed : To extract the timezone, we could split ([+-]) too, but I don't see how to fit this in the rest of the bytes; we'd need to find out the difference to the current timezone, too and add/subtract it to/from the hours, too.

Hmm, interesting. Date() returns a string and new Date() returns an object. I'll look into it.

i don't think you need the 0| anymore.

You're right, @jed Updated accordingly

how about \W instead of [ :]?

Great idea - and since we haven't got special chars here, we can use search instead of indexOf, too.

would still love to nail the timezone issue, i think it's more important than the assignment.

Problems to solve for timezone:

• we lose the +/- of the timezone direction in the splitting atm
• we need to compare to the current timezone :-(

especially the latter will be too long for the last 25 bytes.

good points, @atk.

is there any potential in a function(a){return new Date(a.replace(...))} approach?

Alas, not. Either would it need a regexp to parse the whole string at once, which is 53 bytes long, and/or it would need a callback which resolves the month name, too, a part which currently takes amazing 41 bytes, add the 2 function statements and the new Date() and you're well over 140 bytes. It would look something like this:

function(a){return new Date(a.replace(/\w+ \w(\w+) (\d+) (\d+) (\d+):(\d+):(\d+) \w+(.\d+)/,function(a){a=arguments;[a[0],a[2]]=[a[2],a[0]];a[1]="anebarapayunulugepctovec".search(a[1])/2;return a.join(' ')}))}

Which does not yet take care of the timezone, btw.

i dunno, there's a bunch of stuff i thought was impossible before 140 bytes kicked off. what about something structured like this to reuse functions?

function a(b,c,d,e,f,g){return c?XXXXX:b.replace(/YYYYYY/,a)}

nice idea - I will look into it later.

Shouldn't April be "pr"?

Yes, you are right. Changed.

@jed: I just found out that new Date([string]) internally calls Date.parse - so if it was not available anyway, we could only use eval for call will not work on new Date, thus enlargening the function quite a bit. Anyway, I will try to get Timezone handling inside this later.

Maybe this will help somehow for timezones:
var timezone = -7;
var d = new Date();
d.setUTCFullYear(2011, 6, 1) /* 1 Jul 2011 */
d.setUTCHours(1 + timezone, 0, 0) /* 01:00:00 UTC -7 hours */
console.log(d.toUTCString());
// Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:00:00 GMT
Works well in IE6+, Fx, Op, node.js

currently, I can cope for the given Date's timezone:

function(a){a=a.split(/[^\w-]\D?/);return new Date(a[3],"anebarprayunulugepctovec".search(a[1])/2,a[2],a[4]+(0|a[7].slice(2,5)),a[5],a[6])}

This doesn't take care of the local timezone, though - and I already got 139 bytes without the polyfill prefix.

Date.parse has been around since ES1 making a fallback seems a bit out of place. Also the workings of ES5/5.1 Date.parse are a bit too complex to fit in 140bytes.