How do I get a date in YYYY-MM-DD format?

Question

Normally if I wanted to get the date I could just do something like

var d = new Date(); console.log(d);

The problem with doing that, is when I run that code, it returns:

Mon Aug 24 2015 4:20:00 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

How could I get the Date() method to return a value in a "MM-DD-YYYY" format so it would return something like:

8/24/2015

Or, maybe MM-DD-YYYY H:M

8/24/2016 4:20

Answer 1

Just use the built-in .toISOString() method like so: toISOString().split('T')[0]. Simple, clean and all in a single line.

var date = (new Date()).toISOString().split('T')[0];
document.getElementById('date').innerHTML = date;

<div id="date"></div>

Please note that the timezone of the formatted string is UTC rather than local time.

Answer 2

The below code is a way of doing it. If you have a date, pass it to the convertDate() function and it will return a string in the YYYY-MM-DD format:

var todaysDate = new Date();

function convertDate(date) {
  var yyyy = date.getFullYear().toString();
  var mm = (date.getMonth()+1).toString();
  var dd  = date.getDate().toString();

  var mmChars = mm.split('');
  var ddChars = dd.split('');

  return yyyy + '-' + (mmChars[1]?mm:"0"+mmChars[0]) + '-' + (ddChars[1]?dd:"0"+ddChars[0]);
}

console.log(convertDate(todaysDate)); // Returns: 2015-08-25

Answer 3

Yet another way:

var today = new Date().getFullYear()+'-'+("0"+(new Date().getMonth()+1)).slice(-2)+'-'+("0"+new Date().getDate()).slice(-2)
document.getElementById("today").innerHTML = today

<div id="today">