title: get value of textbox and format to date
body: <p>I've got the following table:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;table id="DateTable" width="100%"&gt;
      &lt;tbody&gt;
          &lt;tr&gt;&lt;td class="text"&gt;
              &lt;html:text property="user.strEndDate" /&gt;
          &lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
      &lt;/tbody&gt;
  &lt;/table&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And I need to get the entered value of user.strEndDate and compare it to another date.
  What I have so far is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>var endDate = new Date($(user.strEndDate).val());
  alert('endDate: ' + endDate);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The value in the textbox is: 01/17/2015. But the code above is coming up with enDate: Invalid Date</p>
  
  <p>How can I get the correct value?</p>