Date.toLocaleDateString()

Returns the date portion of a Date object as a string, using locale conventions

The toLocaleDateString() method returns a string with a language sensitive representation of the date portion of this date.

The new locales and optionsarguments let applications specify the language whose formatting conventions should be used and allow to customise the behaviour of the function. In older implementations, which ignore the locales and options arguments, the locale used and the form of the string returned are entirely implementation dependent.

var event = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0));

var options = { weekday: 'long', year: 'numeric', month: 'long', day: 'numeric' };

console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('de-DE', options));
// expected output: Donnerstag, 20. Dezember 2012

console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('ar-EG', options));
// expected output: الخميس، ٢٠ ديسمبر، ٢٠١٢

console.log(event.toLocaleDateString('ko-KR', options));
// expected output: 2012년 12월 20일 목요일

Syntax

dateObj.toLocaleDateString([locales [, options]])

Parameters

localesOptional. A string with a BCP 47 language tag, or an array of such strings. For the general form and interpretation of the locales argument, see the Intl page. The following Unicode extension keys are allowed:

nuNumbering system. Possible values include: "arab", "arabext", "bali", "beng", "deva", "fullwide", "gujr", "guru", "hanidec", "khmr", "knda", "laoo", "latn", "limb", "mlym", "mong", "mymr", "orya", "tamldec", "telu", "thai", "tibt".

caCalendar. Possible values include: "buddhist", "chinese", "coptic", "ethioaa", "ethiopic", "gregory", "hebrew", "indian", "islamic", "islamicc", "iso8601", "japanese", "persian", "roc".

hcHour cycle. Possible values include: "h11", "h12", "h23", "h24".

optionsOptional. An object with some or all of the following properties:

localeMatcherThe locale matching algorithm to use. Possible values are "lookup" and "best fit"; the default is "best fit". For information about this option, see the Intl page.

timeZoneThe time zone to use. The only value implementations must recognize is "UTC"; the default is the runtime's default time zone. Implementations may also recognize the time zone names of the IANA time zone database, such as "Asia/Shanghai", "Asia/Kolkata", "America/New_York".

hour12Whether to use 12-hour time (as opposed to 24-hour time). Possible values are true and false; the default is locale dependent. This option overrides the hclanguage tag and/or the hourCycle option in case both are present.

hourCycleThe hour cycle to use. Possible values are "h11", "h12", "h23", or "h24". This option overrides the hc language tag, if both are present, and the hour12 option takes precedence in case both options have been specified.

formatMatcherThe format matching algorithm to use. Possible values are "basic" and "best fit"; the default is "best fit". See the following paragraphs for information about the use of this property.

The following properties describe the date-time components to use in formatted output, and their desired representations. Implementations are required to support at least the following subsets:

weekday, year, month, day, hour, minute, second
weekday, year, month, day
year, month, day
year, month
month, day
hour, minute, second
hour, minute

Implementations may support other subsets, and requests will be negotiated against all available subset-representation combinations to find the best match. Two algorithms are available for this negotiation and selected by the formatMatcherproperty: A fully specified "basic" algorithm and an implementation-dependent "best fit" algorithm.

weekdayThe representation of the weekday. Possible values are "narrow", "short", "long".

eraThe representation of the era. Possible values are "narrow", "short", "long".

yearThe representation of the year. Possible values are "numeric", "2-digit".

monthThe representation of the month. Possible values are "numeric", "2-digit", "narrow", "short", "long".

dayThe representation of the day. Possible values are "numeric", "2-digit".

hourThe representation of the hour. Possible values are "numeric", "2-digit".

minuteThe representation of the minute. Possible values are "numeric", "2-digit".

secondThe representation of the second. Possible values are "numeric", "2-digit".

timeZoneNameThe representation of the time zone name. Possible values are "short", "long".

The default value for each date-time component property is undefined, but if the weekday, year, month, day properties are all undefined, then year, month, and dayare assumed to be "numeric".

Return value

A string representing the date portion of the given Date instance according to language-specific conventions.

Description

If a parameter you specify is outside of the expected range, setUTCMilliseconds()attempts to update the date information in the Date object accordingly. For example, if you use 1100 for millisecondsValue, the seconds stored in the Date object will be incremented by 1, and 100 will be used for milliseconds.

Examples

Using `toLocaleDateString()`

In basic use without specifying a locale, a formatted string in the default locale and with default options is returned.

var date = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 12, 3, 0, 0));

// toLocaleDateString() without arguments depends on the implementation,
// the default locale, and the default time zone
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString());
// → "12/11/2012" if run in en-US locale with time zone America/Los_Angeles

Checking for support for `locales` and `options` arguments

The locales and options arguments are not supported in all browsers yet. To check whether an implementation supports them already, you can use the requirement that illegal language tags are rejected with a RangeError exception:

function toLocaleDateStringSupportsLocales() {
  try {
    new Date().toLocaleDateString('i');
  } catch (e) {
    return e.name === 'RangeError';
  }
  return false;
}

Using `locales`

This example shows some of the variations in localized date formats. In order to get the format of the language used in the user interface of your application, make sure to specify that language (and possibly some fallback languages) using the locales argument:

var date = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0));

// formats below assume the local time zone of the locale;
// America/Los_Angeles for the US

// US English uses month-day-year order
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString('en-US'));
// → "12/19/2012"

// British English uses day-month-year order
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString('en-GB'));
// → "20/12/2012"

// Korean uses year-month-day order
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString('ko-KR'));
// → "2012. 12. 20."

// Event for Persian, It's hard to manually convert date to Solar Hijri
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString('fa-IR'));
// → "۱۳۹۱/۹/۳۰"

// Arabic in most Arabic speaking countries uses real Arabic digits
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString('ar-EG'));
// → "٢٠‏/١٢‏/٢٠١٢"

// for Japanese, applications may want to use the Japanese calendar,
// where 2012 was the year 24 of the Heisei era
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString('ja-JP-u-ca-japanese'));
// → "24/12/20"

// when requesting a language that may not be supported, such as
// Balinese, include a fallback language, in this case Indonesian
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString(['ban', 'id']));
// → "20/12/2012"

Using `options`

The results provided by toLocaleDateString() can be customized using the optionsargument:

var date = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0));

// request a weekday along with a long date
var options = { weekday: 'long', year: 'numeric', month: 'long', day: 'numeric' };
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString('de-DE', options));
// → "Donnerstag, 20. Dezember 2012"

// an application may want to use UTC and make that visible
options.timeZone = 'UTC';
options.timeZoneName = 'short';
console.log(date.toLocaleDateString('en-US', options));
// → "Thursday, December 20, 2012, GMT"

Performance

When formatting large numbers of dates, it is better to create an Intl.DateTimeFormatobject and use the function provided by its format property.

References

Contributors to this page

Uros Durdevic

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Last updated 6 years ago