Question

Currently I need to output a date in a: ‘5 October, 2012’ type format. Meaning day-of-month with no leading zeros, space, full month name, comma, space, four-digit year. I need to do this in JavaScript. I have this working but it occurs to me while writing the lengthy code that somebody must’ve already figured out a better way to do this.

I don’t think there is a built in function of JavaScript that formats this exactly how I want. There is just a thing in PHP with date(). Is there a plugin for JavaScript that does the same thing?

For the sake of giving a specific example, in this instance I start with a set number of hours into the future that I need to get the date for.

Currently I have:

    var myNow = new Date().getTime();
    var myTime = hours * 60 * 60 * 1000;
    var myDate = new Date(myTime + myNow);
    var myDay = myDate.getDate();
    var myMonthNum = myDate.getMonth();
    var myMonth = '';
    var myYear = myDate.getFullYear();

    switch(myMonthNum) {
        case 0:
            myMonth = 'January';
            break;
        ...

    var completeDate = myDate = " " + myMonth + ", " + myYear;
    $('#theEndDate').html(completeDate);

Answer 1

No, there is nothing built-in for Dateobjects, but there are a bunch of libraries to deal with and format them:

• date.js
• moment.js
• XDate
• Date and Date.Extras in Mootools
• Date in Sugar
• Dojo.date
• a few functions in Mochikit
• DateFormat (only PHP’s date)
• date at php.js
• DataType in YUI, especially for i18n
• date-functions.js, used especially by JQuery datetimepicker plugin