How to format date in JavaScript (Date(), moment.js)

In this article you will learn ways to format date in JavaScript using both native language resources and external libraries.

What’s up programmer, how are you? Let’s learn more about JavaScript and date formatting!

In JavaScript we don’t have a native way of printing dates in Portuguese, so we can resort to some features of the language itself as well as external ones

In my searches on the subject, I found a function that aims to format each part of the date, for that purpose the Date object offers us the pt-br format

And then, we rejoin these fractions into a string

See an example of this function:

function actualDate(){

let date = new Date(),
 day = data.getDate().toString().padStart(2, '0'),
 month = (data.getMonth()+1).toString().padStart(2, '0'),
 year = data.getFullYear();
 return `${day}/${month}/${year}`;
}
console.log(actualDate());

We will then have the following output:

12/05/2020

Of course this will depend on your current date, but see that the function does what it promises

We can then make variations of it by modifying the parameters so that it will return us another date

For example, instead of instantiating to get the current date, passing an argument in milliseconds of the date we want to format in our language

Using the moment.js

Note: moment.js is now deprecated

Another approach would be to use this great lib, which has its only focus on formatting dates

Click here to access the documentation

Basically we pass a string, which will form the date we need

See an example of use:

moment().format('MMMM Do YYYY, h:mm:ss a');

Much easier, right? 😀

Conclusion

In this article we learned how to format date in JavaScript

We use a strand of the pure JavaScript language, creating a function and using the available methods

And then we learned moment.js, which is a lib that perfectly solves the problem of formatting dates.

How to format date in JavaScript (Date(), moment.js)