Although it only works in Chrome and FireBug, I’ve found console.log() to be an extremely handy tool for debugging javascript without having to step through code.

Here’s a bit of code I’ve found handy to make sure browsers without console.log don’t bomb out in case you forget to take your console.log statements out:

if (window.console == undefined) { window.console = {log:function(){},dir:function(){}}; }

Make sure to add this near the top of your scripts and you’ll be able to use console.log without fear of it causing problems in browsers like IE.

I recently ran into a situation where I needed to know how many Monday’s were in a given month via javascript and figured I would make the function (which depends on Date extensions by ExtJS) for it available here in case anyone else runs into the same problem.

/*
 * This function takes a date and determines how many of each day of the week
 * are in the month.
 */
var getMonthlyDayOfWeekCount = function(sourceDate){
    var iDate = Date.parseDate(sourceDate.format('m') + '/1/' + sourceDate.format('Y'), 'm/j/Y');
    var days = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0];

    while (iDate.format('m') == sourceDate.format('m')) {
        days[iDate.format('w')]++;
        iDate = iDate.add(Date.DAY, 1);
    }

    return days;
};

/*
 * This function takes a date and returns an interger cotnaining the
 * occurance of this day in the month.
 *
 * Useful for when you want to know if this is the 1st or 3rd Saturday in
 * the month.
 */
var getDayInMonthCount = function(sourceDate){
    var iDate = Date.parseDate(sourceDate.format('m') + '/1/' + sourceDate.format('Y'), 'm/j/Y');
    count = 1;

    while (iDate.format('m') == sourceDate.format('m')) {
        if (iDate.format('z Y') == sourceDate.format('z Y')) {
            return count;
        }

        if (iDate.format('w') == sourceDate.format('w')) {
            count++;
        }
        iDate = iDate.add(Date.DAY, 1);
    }

    return count;
};