Question

I noticed that JavaScript’s new Date() function is very smart in accepting dates in several formats.

Xmas95 = new Date("25 Dec, 1995 23:15:00")
Xmas95 = new Date("2009 06 12,12:52:39")
Xmas95 = new Date("20 09 2006,12:52:39")

I could not find documentation anywhere showing all the valid string formats while calling new Date() function.

This is for converting a string to a date. If we look at the opposite side, that is, converting a date object to a string, until now I was under the impression that JavaScript doesn’t have a built-in API to format a date object into a string.

Editor’s note: The following approach is the asker’s attempt that worked on a particular browser but does not work in general; see the answers on this page to see some actual solutions.

Today, I played with the toString() method on the date object and surprisingly it serves the purpose of formatting date to strings.

var d1 = new Date();
d1.toString('yyyy-MM-dd');       //Returns "2009-06-29" in Internet Explorer, but not Firefox or Chrome
d1.toString('dddd, MMMM ,yyyy')  //Returns "Monday, June 29,2009" in Internet Explorer, but not Firefox or Chrome

Also here I couldn’t find any documentation on all the ways we can format the date object into a string.

Where is the documentation which lists the format specifiers supported by the Date() object?

Answer 1

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);