Question

Looking for a creative way to be sure values that come from the getHours, getMinutes, and getSeconds() method for the javascript Date object return "06" instead of 6 (for example). Are there any parameters that I don’t know about? Obviously I could write a function that does it by checking the length and prepending a "0" if need be, but I thought there might be something more streamlined than that.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Update: ECMAScript 2017 (ECMA-262)

padStart has been added to pad the beginning of a string with another string, where the first value is the length it should be and the second value being what to pad it with.

For example:

let d = new Date()
let h = `${d.getHours()}`.padStart(2, '0')
let m = `${d.getMinutes()}`.padStart(2, '0')
let s = `${d.getSeconds()}`.padStart(2, '0')

let displayDate = h + ":" + m + ":" + s
// Possible Output: 09:01:34

---

Pre-ECMAScript 2017

As far as I know, there’s not. And I do this all the time for converting dates to the XML dateTime format.

It’s also important to note that those methods you list return a number, not a string.

You can, of course, add these yourself by modifying Date.prototype.

Date.prototype.getHoursTwoDigits = function()
{
    var retval = this.getHours();
    if (retval < 10)
    {
        return ("0" + retval.toString());
    }
    else
    {
        return retval.toString();
    }
}

var date = new Date();
date.getHoursTwoDigits();