Have one of these?
Sat Mar 01 2025 19:50:03 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
<!-- or perhaps one of these? -->
<!-- 2025-03-02T01:23:48.693Z -->
Need one of these?
March 1, 2025
Or some other format? You probably don’t need moment.js or piles of StackOverflow-ing into your apartment, you just need Date.toLocaleDateString(). Here’s some common use cases:
YMMV with the en-US locale tag — if you’re based somewhere else you might be better served by using another locale.
Date Only
March 1, 2025
new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-US', {
month: 'long',
day: 'numeric',
year: 'numeric',
});
This .toLocaleDateString() method exists on any Date object. If we’ve got a string that represents a date, we’ll need to parse a Date object from it first:
const someArbitraryDate = new Date(Date.parse('2025-03-02T01:23:48.693Z'));
someArbitraryDate.toLocaleDateString();
3/1/2025
new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-US');
03/01/25
new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-US', {
month: '2-digit',
year: '2-digit',
day: '2-digit',
});
01/03/25 (blimey lol)
new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-GB', {
month: '2-digit',
year: '2-digit',
day: '2-digit',
});
Saturday, March 1, 2025
new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-US', {
dateStyle: 'full',
});
Time only
Now we’ll mix it up and use Date().toLocaleTimeString()
8:08:03 PM
new Date().toLocaleTimeString();
20:08:03 PM
new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {
hour12: false,
});
8:08 PM
new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {
timeStyle: 'short',
});
8:08:03 PM EST
new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {
timeStyle: 'long',
});
8:08:03 PM Eastern Standard Time
new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {
timeStyle: 'full',
});
8:08:03 PM East Africa Time
new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {
timeStyle: 'full',
timeZone: 'Africa/Nairobi',
});
For a full list of time zone options, you can use the TZ identifier column on the Wikipedia list page for tz database time zones.
8:08:03 PM GMT+3
new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {
timeZone: 'Africa/Nairobi',
timeZoneName: 'short',
});
8 PM
new Date().toLocaleTimeString('en-US', {
hour: 'numeric',
});
Date & Time
You can use Date.toLocaleString to combine the two:
3/1/2025, 8:08:03 PM
new Date().toLocaleString('en-US');
Mar 1, 2025, 8:08 PM
new Date().toLocaleString('en-US', {
dateStyle: 'medium',
timeStyle: 'short',
});