JavaScript Date Comparisons Don't Equal

Question

I've tried searching for people with similar questions, but haven't found anything.

I have two dates in JavaScript, both set to the same value... Equality Testing fails on ==, but >= and <= evaluate true.

Below is the code I have in play:

var startDate = new Date( 2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0 );

var dt = new Date( 2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0 );

if( startDate == dt )
    document.write('They Equal<br />');

if( startDate > dt )
    document.write('Start Date is > dt<br />');

if( startDate >= dt )
    document.write('Start Date is >= dt<br />');

if( startDate < dt )
    document.write('Start Date is < dt<br />');

if( startDate <= dt )
    document.write('Start Date is <= dt<br />');

if( dt == startDate )
    document.write('They Equal<br />');

if( dt > startDate )
    document.write('dt > startDate<br />');

if( dt >= startDate )
    document.write('dt >= Start Date <br />');

if( dt < startDate )
    document.write('dt < Start Date <br />');

if( dt <= startDate )
    document.write('dt <= Start Date <br />');  

document.write( dt );
document.write( '<br />');
document.write( startDate );

Has anyone encountered anything like this, or am I doing something fundamentally wrong?

I tested this is Internet Explorer (9), Firefox 5+, and Chrome.

Update:

So two people posted great answers to my problem, and I thank both of you: xdazz and DaveRandom. I had read an earlier post on stackoverflow.com on a similar question and a guy said that date objects could be compared like any others, and any other example I found always did a < or > type of compare, never a full equality so I wasn't able to make the connection as to why I was doing it wrong.

Thanks to you two, and the others that posted similar answers.

Answer 1

When you use <= or >= to compare two date objects, they are compared via valueOf, which is the same as getTime for Date.

But when you use ==, they are two different objects of the same type, so it returns false.

Added some examples:

> new Date(2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0) == new Date( 2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0 )
false
> new Date(2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0).getTime() == new Date( 2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0).getTime()
true
> new Date(2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0).valueOf() == new Date( 2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0).valueOf()
true
> new Date(2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0).valueOf() == new Date( 2011, 7, 30, 0, 0, 0, 0).getTime()
true