Pfthb

Personally I would use a library such as the very good Moment.JS library, to handle all the horrible complexity of dates.

It has a difference method:

http://momentjs.com/docs/#/displaying/difference/

e.g.

var a = moment([2007, 0, 29]);
var b = moment([2007, 0, 28]);
a.diff(b) // 86400000

It would then be trivial to Math.min() the differences of each date in your list.

There's also a moment.min, which might shortcut this entirely, if all your dates are in the future already:

http://momentjs.com/docs/#/get-set/min/

A naïve implementation would be to parse each date as a string and sort them in ascending order. Then, remove any dates that are in the past, and get the first child of the array of remaining dates. See this jsbin example:

var dates = [
 '2/3/2015',
 '7/5/2015',
 '1/21/2016',
 '2/19/2016',
 '7/1/2016'
];

// parse each string as a Date object and sort them in ascending order
function sortDates(dates) 
 return dates.map(function(date) 
 return new Date(date).getTime();
 ).sort(function(a, b) 
 return a - b;
 );


var orderedDates = sortDates(dates);

// remove any dates in the past, and get the first child of the array of remaining dates
var nextDate = orderedDates.filter(function(date) 
 return (Date.now() - date) > 0;
)[0];

Keep in mind that this depends on the format of the date string that you pass to the Date object (in other words, is 1/12/2015 January 12th, or December 1st? JavaScript will parse it as January 12th.

You can use while loop, new Date()

var dates = ["2/3/2015","7/5/2015","1/21/2016","2/19/2016","7/1/2016"]
, d = "1/22/2016", n = -1, res = null;

while (++n < dates.length && new Date(dates[n]) < new Date(d));
res = dates[n] || d;
console.log(res)

Lots of answers, one more can't hurt.

Date strings should always be manually parsed. A library can help, but if you only have a single format, a simple function is all that's required.

The following uses reduce to loop over the array of dates and finds the closest future date. If no date is in the future, it returns null.

The returned value is the string from the array, not a Date.

function parseMDY(s) 
 var b = (s 

function getClosestDateToToday(arr) 
 var now = new Date();
 now.setHours(23,59,59);
 return arr.reduce(function (acc, s) 
 var d = parseMDY(s);
 return d < now? acc : (acc && d > parseMDY(acc)? acc : s);
 , null);


var dates = ['2/3/2015', '7/5/2015','1/21/2016',
 '2/19/2016','7/1/2016'];

document.write(getClosestDateToToday(dates));

This really depends upon your dates and data structures (the ones shown in original example are not so great for me).

From the other answers...

To take the example from Josh, you could also keep a pointer to which date you are using, or simply shift off of a sorted queue of dates to make it work, but it's really adding noise to your code, disrupting the purpose.

Frederik.L answer is really beautiful code, but it would still have to be executed multiple times, so I cannot recommend it.

Feedback warning

I've been given feedback in comments that Date.parse can behave inconsistently. I'll move to passing a date parsing callback function, and demonstrate Date.UTC usage in the callback for OP-specific date format. Please be careful when defining your own callbacks, and please do not copy-paste.

Suggestion

I'd suggest utilizing Date functions i.e. Date.parse; but also try where possible to get data sources sorted without needing application-level sorting. Then you can store-once and step through the array using array.shift() or similar;

Ideally also YYYY-MM-DD

• Four-Digit Year


• Two-Digit Month


• Two-Digit Day


• ... (continue from least occurring to most occurring)

sample code

var dates = [
 '2/3/2015',
 '7/5/2015',
 '7/1/2016',
 '1/21/2016',
 '2/19/2016'
]; // unsorted garbage dates

var DateList = function( dateList, getDate ) 
 var sortedDates = dateList.sort( function(a, b) 
 return getDate(a) - getDate(b);
 );
 this.next = function() 
 var dt = sortedDates.shift();
 sortedDates.push(dt); // comment to remove cyclical nature
 return dt;
 
;

// specific implementation parser for this format
var getDisgustingDateFormat = function(dStr) 
 var dParts = dStr.split('/');
 return new Date(Date.UTC(dParts[2],dParts[0],dParts[1]));
;
var dl = new DateList( dates, getDisgustingDateFormat );

Usage

dl.next(); // "2/3/2015"
dl.next(); // "7/5/2015"
dl.next(); // "1/21/2016"
dl.next(); // "2/19/2016"
dl.next(); // "7/1/2016"
dl.next(); // "2/3/2015"

Hope this helps (Updated for clarity)