Where can I find documentation on formatting a date in JavaScript?

I love 10 ways to format time and date using JavaScript and Working with Dates.

Basically, you have three methods and you have to combine the strings for yourself:

getDate() // Returns the date
getMonth() // Returns the month
getFullYear() // Returns the year

Example:

var d = new Date();
var curr_date = d.getDate();
var curr_month = d.getMonth() + 1; //Months are zero based
var curr_year = d.getFullYear();
console.log(curr_date + "-" + curr_month + "-" + curr_year);

Moment.js

It is a (lightweight)* JavaScript date library for parsing, manipulating, and formatting dates.

var a = moment([2010, 1, 14, 15, 25, 50, 125]);
a.format("dddd, MMMM Do YYYY, h:mm:ss a"); // "Sunday, February 14th 2010, 3:25:50 pm"
a.format("ddd, hA");                       // "Sun, 3PM"

(*) lightweight meaning 9.3KB minified + gzipped in the smallest possible setup (feb 2014)

Make sure you checkout Datejs when dealing with dates in JavaScript. It's quite impressive and well documented as you can see in case of the toString function.

EDIT: Tyler Forsythe points out, that datejs is outdated. I use it in my current project and hadn't any trouble with it, however you should be aware of this and consider alternatives.

Example code:

var d = new Date();
var time = d.toISOString().replace(/.*?T(\d+:\d+:\d+).*/, "$1");

Output:

"13:45:20"

the lazy solution is to use Date.toLocaleString with the right region code

to get a list of matching regions you can run

#!/bin/bash

[ -f bcp47.json ] || \
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pculture/bcp47-json/master/bcp47.json

grep 'tag" : ' bcp47.json | cut -d'"' -f4 >codes.txt

js=$(cat <<'EOF'
const fs = require('fs');
const d = new Date(2020, 11, 12, 20, 00, 00);
fs.readFileSync('codes.txt', 'utf8')
.split('\n')
.forEach(code => {
  try {
    console.log(code+' '+d.toLocaleString(code))
  }
  catch (e) { console.log(code+' '+e.message) }
});
EOF
)

# print THE LIST of civilized countries
echo "$js" | node - | grep '2020-12-12 20:00:00'

and here is .... THE LIST

af ce eo gv ha ku kw ky lt mg rw se sn sv xh zu 
ksh mgo sah wae AF KW KY LT MG RW SE SN SV

sample use:

(new Date()).toLocaleString('af')

// -> '2020-12-21 11:50:15'

: )

(note. this MAY not be portable.)

date-fns is the latest and greatest contender (better than momentjs at this moment). Some of the advantages are

• Modular
• Immutable
• I18n
• Tree-shaking
• Typescript support

Refer here for documentation

And you'd do something like this:

import { format, formatDistance, formatRelative, subDays } from 'date-fns'

format(new Date(), "'Today is a' eeee")
//=> "Today is a Tuesday"

formatDistance(subDays(new Date(), 3), new Date(), { addSuffix: true })
//=> "3 days ago"

formatRelative(subDays(new Date(), 3), new Date())
//=> "last Friday at 7:26 p.m."

Almost all the modern browsers now support toLocaleString(locales, options) & toLocaleDateString(locales, options) where options is an optional parameter to sepcify the format.

Example:

const event = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0));
const options = { weekday: 'long', year: 'numeric', month: 'long', day: 'numeric' };

console.log(event.toLocaleDateString(undefined, options));
// expected output: Thursday, December 20, 2012 (varies according to default locale)

And according to tc39.es/ecma402 and w3c.org, following are the supported list of parameter values :

locales:

ar-SA, bn-BD, bn-IN, cs-CZ, da-DK, de-AT, de-CH, de-DE, el-GR, en-AU, en-CA, en-GB, en-IE, en-IN, en-NZ, en-US, en-ZA, es-AR, es-CL, es-CO, es-ES, es-MX, es-US, fi-FI, fr-BE, fr-CA, fr-CH, fr-FR, he-IL, hi-IN, hu-HU, id-ID, it-CH, it-IT, ja-JP, ko-KR, nl-BE, nl-NL, no-NO, pl-PL, pt-BR, pt-PT, ro-RO, ru-RU, sk-SK, sv-SE, ta-IN, ta-LK, th-TH, tr-TR, zh-CN, zh-HK, zh-TW

options:

For curious folks, there is an experimental feature called tc39/temporal which is currently at stage 3 proposal that brings a modern date/time API to the ECMAScript language.

Quoting the tc39 website:

Date has been a long-standing pain point in ECMAScript. This is a proposal for Temporal, a global Object that acts as a top-level namespace (like Math), that brings a modern date/time API to the ECMAScript language. For a detailed look at some of the problems with Date, and the motivations for Temporal, see: Fixing JavaScript Date.

A cookbook to help you get started and learn the ins and outs of Temporal is available here.

Additional Resources:

• GitHub Repository - tc39/proposal-temporal
• There's also a YouTube video which talks about this proposal in detail.
  • This article gives a brief overview of the above video - Learn how JavaScript advances DateTime with proposal-temporal
• How to Outsmart Time: Building Futuristic JavaScript Apps Using Temporal