Format JavaScript date as yyyy-mm-dd

Just leverage the built-in toISOString method that brings your date to the ISO 8601 format:

let yourDate = new Date()
yourDate.toISOString().split('T')[0]

Where yourDate is your date object.

Edit: @exbuddha wrote this to handle time zone in the comments:

const offset = yourDate.getTimezoneOffset()
yourDate = new Date(yourDate.getTime() - (offset*60*1000))
return yourDate.toISOString().split('T')[0]

---

You can do:

function formatDate(date) { var d = new Date(date), month = '' + (d.getMonth() + 1), day = '' + d.getDate(), year = d.getFullYear(); if (month.length < 2) month = '0' + month; if (day.length < 2) day = '0' + day; return [year, month, day].join('-'); } console.log(formatDate('Sun May 11,2014'));

Usage example:

console.log(formatDate('Sun May 11,2014'));

Output:

2014-05-11

Demo on JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/abdulrauf6182012/2Frm3/

---

I use this way to get the date in format yyyy-mm-dd :)

var todayDate = new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 10); console.log(todayDate);

---

2020 ANSWER

You can use the native .toLocaleDateString() function which supports several useful params like locale (to select a format like MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD), timezone (to convert the date) and formats details options (eg: 1 vs 01 vs January).

Examples

const testCases = [ new Date().toLocaleDateString(), // 8/19/2020 new Date().toLocaleString(undefined, {year: 'numeric', month: '2-digit', day: '2-digit', weekday:"long", hour: '2-digit', hour12: false, minute:'2-digit', second:'2-digit'}), new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-US', {year: 'numeric', month: '2-digit', day: '2-digit'}), // 08/19/2020 (month and day with two digits) new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-ZA'), // 2020/08/19 (year/month/day) notice the different locale new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-CA'), // 2020-08-19 (year-month-day) notice the different locale new Date().toLocaleString("en-US", {timeZone: "America/New_York"}), // 8/19/2020, 9:29:51 AM. (date and time in a specific timezone) new Date().toLocaleString("en-US", {hour: '2-digit', hour12: false, timeZone: "America/New_York"}), // 09 (just the hour) ] for (const testData of testCases) { console.log(testData) }

Notice that sometimes to output a date in your specific desire format, you have to find a compatible locale with that format. You can find the locale examples here: https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/tryit.asp?filename=tryjsref_tolocalestring_date_all

Please notice that locale just change the format, if you want to transform a specific date to a specific country or city time equivalent then you need to use the timezone param.

---

The simplest way to convert your date to the yyyy-mm-dd format, is to do this:

var date = new Date("Sun May 11,2014");
var dateString = new Date(date.getTime() - (date.getTimezoneOffset() * 60000 ))
                    .toISOString()
                    .split("T")[0];

How it works:

new Date("Sun May 11,2014") converts the string "Sun May 11,2014" to a date object that represents the time Sun May 11 2014 00:00:00 in a timezone based on current locale (host system settings)

new Date(date.getTime() - (date.getTimezoneOffset() * 60000 )) converts your date to a date object that corresponds with the time Sun May 11 2014 00:00:00 in UTC (standard time) by subtracting the time zone offset

.toISOString() converts the date object to an ISO 8601 string 2014-05-11T00:00:00.000Z

.split("T") splits the string to array ["2014-05-11", "00:00:00.000Z"]

[0] takes the first element of that array

Demo

var date = new Date("Sun May 11,2014"); var dateString = new Date(date.getTime() - (date.getTimezoneOffset() * 60000 )) .toISOString() .split("T")[0]; console.log(dateString);

---

A combination of some of the answers:

var d = new Date(date);
date = [
  d.getFullYear(),
  ('0' + (d.getMonth() + 1)).slice(-2),
  ('0' + d.getDate()).slice(-2)
].join('-');

---

format = function date2str(x, y) {
    var z = {
        M: x.getMonth() + 1,
        d: x.getDate(),
        h: x.getHours(),
        m: x.getMinutes(),
        s: x.getSeconds()
    };
    y = y.replace(/(M+|d+|h+|m+|s+)/g, function(v) {
        return ((v.length > 1 ? "0" : "") + z[v.slice(-1)]).slice(-2)
    });

    return y.replace(/(y+)/g, function(v) {
        return x.getFullYear().toString().slice(-v.length)
    });
}

Result:

format(new Date('Sun May 11,2014'), 'yyyy-MM-dd')
"2014-05-11

---

If you don't have anything against using libraries, you could just use the Moments.js library like so:

var now = new Date(); var dateString = moment(now).format('YYYY-MM-DD'); var dateStringWithTime = moment(now).format('YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss');

---

You can use toLocaleDateString('fr-CA') on Date object

console.log(new Date('Sun May 11,2014').toLocaleDateString('fr-CA'));

Also I found out that those locales give right result from this locales list List of All Locales and Their Short Codes?

'en-CA'
'fr-CA'
'lt-LT'
'sv-FI'
'sv-SE'

var localesList = ["af-ZA", "am-ET", "ar-AE", "ar-BH", "ar-DZ", "ar-EG", "ar-IQ", "ar-JO", "ar-KW", "ar-LB", "ar-LY", "ar-MA", "arn-CL", "ar-OM", "ar-QA", "ar-SA", "ar-SY", "ar-TN", "ar-YE", "as-IN", "az-Cyrl-AZ", "az-Latn-AZ", "ba-RU", "be-BY", "bg-BG", "bn-BD", "bn-IN", "bo-CN", "br-FR", "bs-Cyrl-BA", "bs-Latn-BA", "ca-ES", "co-FR", "cs-CZ", "cy-GB", "da-DK", "de-AT", "de-CH", "de-DE", "de-LI", "de-LU", "dsb-DE", "dv-MV", "el-GR", "en-029", "en-AU", "en-BZ", "en-CA", "en-GB", "en-IE", "en-IN", "en-JM", "en-MY", "en-NZ", "en-PH", "en-SG", "en-TT", "en-US", "en-ZA", "en-ZW", "es-AR", "es-BO", "es-CL", "es-CO", "es-CR", "es-DO", "es-EC", "es-ES", "es-GT", "es-HN", "es-MX", "es-NI", "es-PA", "es-PE", "es-PR", "es-PY", "es-SV", "es-US", "es-UY", "es-VE", "et-EE", "eu-ES", "fa-IR", "fi-FI", "fil-PH", "fo-FO", "fr-BE", "fr-CA", "fr-CH", "fr-FR", "fr-LU", "fr-MC", "fy-NL", "ga-IE", "gd-GB", "gl-ES", "gsw-FR", "gu-IN", "ha-Latn-NG", "he-IL", "hi-IN", "hr-BA", "hr-HR", "hsb-DE", "hu-HU", "hy-AM", "id-ID", "ig-NG", "ii-CN", "is-IS", "it-CH", "it-IT", "iu-Cans-CA", "iu-Latn-CA", "ja-JP", "ka-GE", "kk-KZ", "kl-GL", "km-KH", "kn-IN", "kok-IN", "ko-KR", "ky-KG", "lb-LU", "lo-LA", "lt-LT", "lv-LV", "mi-NZ", "mk-MK", "ml-IN", "mn-MN", "mn-Mong-CN", "moh-CA", "mr-IN", "ms-BN", "ms-MY", "mt-MT", "nb-NO", "ne-NP", "nl-BE", "nl-NL", "nn-NO", "nso-ZA", "oc-FR", "or-IN", "pa-IN", "pl-PL", "prs-AF", "ps-AF", "pt-BR", "pt-PT", "qut-GT", "quz-BO", "quz-EC", "quz-PE", "rm-CH", "ro-RO", "ru-RU", "rw-RW", "sah-RU", "sa-IN", "se-FI", "se-NO", "se-SE", "si-LK", "sk-SK", "sl-SI", "sma-NO", "sma-SE", "smj-NO", "smj-SE", "smn-FI", "sms-FI", "sq-AL", "sr-Cyrl-BA", "sr-Cyrl-CS", "sr-Cyrl-ME", "sr-Cyrl-RS", "sr-Latn-BA", "sr-Latn-CS", "sr-Latn-ME", "sr-Latn-RS", "sv-FI", "sv-SE", "sw-KE", "syr-SY", "ta-IN", "te-IN", "tg-Cyrl-TJ", "th-TH", "tk-TM", "tn-ZA", "tr-TR", "tt-RU", "tzm-Latn-DZ", "ug-CN", "uk-UA", "ur-PK", "uz-Cyrl-UZ", "uz-Latn-UZ", "vi-VN", "wo-SN", "xh-ZA", "yo-NG", "zh-CN", "zh-HK", "zh-MO", "zh-SG", "zh-TW", "zu-ZA" ]; localesList.forEach(lcl => { if ("2014-05-11" === new Date('Sun May 11,2014').toLocaleDateString(lcl)) { console.log(lcl, new Date('Sun May 11,2014').toLocaleDateString(lcl)); } });

---

Simply use this:

var date = new Date('1970-01-01'); // Or your date here
console.log((date.getMonth() + 1) + '/' + date.getDate() + '/' +  date.getFullYear());

Simple and sweet ;)

---

Shortest

.toJSON().slice(0,10);

var d = new Date('Sun May 11,2014' +' UTC'); // Parse as UTC let str = d.toJSON().slice(0,10); // Show as UTC console.log(str);

---

toISOString() assumes your date is local time and converts it to UTC. You will get an incorrect date string.

The following method should return what you need.

Date.prototype.yyyymmdd = function() {         

    var yyyy = this.getFullYear().toString();                                    
    var mm = (this.getMonth()+1).toString(); // getMonth() is zero-based         
    var dd  = this.getDate().toString();             

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

Source: https://blog.justin.kelly.org.au/simple-javascript-function-to-format-the-date-as-yyyy-mm-dd/

---

Retrieve year, month, and day, and then put them together. Straight, simple, and accurate.

function formatDate(date) { var year = date.getFullYear().toString(); var month = (date.getMonth() + 101).toString().substring(1); var day = (date.getDate() + 100).toString().substring(1); return year + "-" + month + "-" + day; } //Usage example: alert(formatDate(new Date()));

---

The 2021 solution using Intl.

The new Intl Object is now supported on all browsers.
You can choose the format by choosing a "locale" that uses the required format.

The Swedish locale uses the format "yyyy-mm-dd":

// Create a date
const date = new Date(2021, 10, 28);

// Create a formatter using the "sv-SE" locale
const dateFormatter = Intl.DateTimeFormat('sv-SE');

// Use the formatter to format the date
console.log(dateFormatter.format(date)); // "2021-11-28"

Downsides of using Intl:

You cannot "unformat" or "parse" strings using this method

You have to search for the required format (for instance on Wikipedia) and cannot use a format-string like "yyyy-mm-dd"

---

In the most of cases (no time zone handling) this is enough:

date.toISOString().substring(0,10)

Example

var date = new Date();
console.log(date.toISOString()); // 2022-07-04T07:14:08.925Z
console.log(date.toISOString().substring(0,10)); // 2022-07-04

---

To consider the timezone also, this one-liner should be good without any library:

new Date().toLocaleString("en-IN", {timeZone: "Asia/Kolkata"}).split(',')[0]

---

You can try this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/timesolver

npm i timesolver

Use it in your code:

const timeSolver = require('timeSolver');
const date = new Date();
const dateString = timeSolver.getString(date, "YYYY-MM-DD");

You can get the date string by using this method:

getString

---

new Date().toLocaleDateString('pt-br').split( '/' ).reverse( ).join( '-' );

or

new Date().toISOString().split('T')[0]
new Date('23/03/2020'.split('/').reverse().join('-')).toISOString()
new Date('23/03/2020'.split('/').reverse().join('-')).toISOString().split('T')[0]

Try this!

---

When ES2018 rolls around (works in chrome) you can simply regex it

(new Date())
    .toISOString()
    .replace(
        /^(?<year>\d+)-(?<month>\d+)-(?<day>\d+)T.*$/,
        '$<year>-$<month>-$<day>'
    )

2020-07-14

Or if you'd like something pretty versatile with no libraries whatsoever

(new Date())
    .toISOString()
    .match(
        /^(?<yyyy>\d\d(?<yy>\d\d))-(?<mm>0?(?<m>\d+))-(?<dd>0?(?<d>\d+))T(?<HH>0?(?<H>\d+)):(?<MM>0?(?<M>\d+)):(?<SSS>(?<SS>0?(?<S>\d+))\.\d+)(?<timezone>[A-Z][\dA-Z.-:]*)$/
    )
    .groups

Which results in extracting the following

{
    H: "8"
    HH: "08"
    M: "45"
    MM: "45"
    S: "42"
    SS: "42"
    SSS: "42.855"
    d: "14"
    dd: "14"
    m: "7"
    mm: "07"
    timezone: "Z"
    yy: "20"
    yyyy: "2020"
}

Which you can use like so with replace(..., '$<d>/$<m>/\'$<yy> @ $<H>:$<MM>') as at the top instead of .match(...).groups to get

14/7/'20 @ 8:45

---

const formatDate = d => [
    d.getFullYear(),
    (d.getMonth() + 1).toString().padStart(2, '0'),
    d.getDate().toString().padStart(2, '0')
].join('-');

You can make use of padstart.

padStart(n, '0') ensures that a minimum of n characters are in a string and prepends it with '0's until that length is reached.

join('-') concatenates an array, adding '-' symbol between every elements.

getMonth() starts at 0 hence the +1.

---

I suggest using something like formatDate-js instead of trying to replicate it every time. Just use a library that supports all the major strftime actions.

new Date().format("%Y-%m-%d")

---

Unfortunately, JavaScript's Date object has many pitfalls. Any solution based on Date's builtin toISOString has to mess with the timezone, as discussed in some other answers to this question. The clean solution to represent an ISO-8601 date (without time) is given by Temporal.PlainDate from the Temporal proposal. As of February 2021, you have to choose the workaround that works best for you.

use Date with vanilla string concatenation

Assuming that your internal representation is based on Date, you can perform manual string concatenation. The following code avoids some of Date's pitfalls (timezone, zero-based month, missing 2-digit formatting), but there might be other issues.

function vanillaToDateOnlyIso8601() {
  // month May has zero-based index 4
  const date = new Date(2014, 4, 11);

  const yyyy = date.getFullYear();
  const mm = String(date.getMonth() + 1).padStart(2, "0"); // month is zero-based
  const dd = String(date.getDate()).padStart(2, "0");

  if (yyyy < 1583) {
    // TODO: decide how to support dates before 1583
    throw new Error(`dates before year 1583 are not supported`);
  }

  const formatted = `${yyyy}-${mm}-${dd}`;
  console.log("vanilla", formatted);
}

use Date with helper library (e.g. formatISO from date-fns)

This is a popular approach, but you are still forced to handle a calendar date as a Date, which represents

a single moment in time in a platform-independent format

The following code should get the job done, though:

import { formatISO } from "date-fns";

function dateFnsToDateOnlyIso8601() {
  // month May has zero-based index 4
  const date = new Date(2014, 4, 11);
  const formatted = formatISO(date, { representation: "date" });
  console.log("date-fns", formatted);
}

find a library that properly represents dates and times

I wish there was a clean and battle-tested library that brings its own well-designed date–time representations. A promising candidate for the task in this question was LocalDate from @js-joda/core, but the library is less active than, say, date-fns. When playing around with some example code, I also had some issues after adding the optional @js-joda/timezone.

However, the core functionality works and looks very clean to me:

import { LocalDate, Month } from "@js-joda/core";

function jodaDateOnlyIso8601() {
  const someDay = LocalDate.of(2014, Month.MAY, 11);
  const formatted = someDay.toString();
  console.log("joda", formatted);
}

experiment with the Temporal-proposal polyfill

This is not recommended for production, but you can import the future if you wish:

import { Temporal } from "proposal-temporal";

function temporalDateOnlyIso8601() {
  // yep, month is one-based here (as of Feb 2021)
  const plainDate = new Temporal.PlainDate(2014, 5, 11);
  const formatted = plainDate.toString();
  console.log("proposal-temporal", formatted);
}

---

Here is one way to do it:

var date = Date.parse('Sun May 11,2014');

function format(date) {
  date = new Date(date);

  var day = ('0' + date.getDate()).slice(-2);
  var month = ('0' + (date.getMonth() + 1)).slice(-2);
  var year = date.getFullYear();

  return year + '-' + month + '-' + day;
}

console.log(format(date));

---

Date.js is great for this.

require("datejs")
(new Date()).toString("yyyy-MM-dd")

---

None of these answers quite satisfied me. I wanted a cross-platform solution that gave me the day in the local timezone without using any external libraries.

This is what I came up with:

function localDay(time) {
  var minutesOffset = time.getTimezoneOffset()
  var millisecondsOffset = minutesOffset*60*1000
  var local = new Date(time - millisecondsOffset)
  return local.toISOString().substr(0, 10)
}

That should return the day of the date, in YYYY-MM-DD format, in the timezone the date references.

So for example, localDay(new Date("2017-08-24T03:29:22.099Z")) will return "2017-08-23" even though it's already the 24th at UTC.

You'll need to polyfill Date.prototype.toISOString for it to work in Internet Explorer 8, but it should be supported everywhere else.

---

A few of the previous answer were OK, but they weren't very flexible. I wanted something that could really handle more edge cases, so I took @orangleliu 's answer and expanded on it. https://jsfiddle.net/8904cmLd/1/

function DateToString(inDate, formatString) {
    // Written by m1m1k 2018-04-05

    // Validate that we're working with a date
    if(!isValidDate(inDate))
    {
        inDate = new Date(inDate);
    }

    // See the jsFiddle for extra code to be able to use DateToString('Sun May 11,2014', 'USA');
    //formatString = CountryCodeToDateFormat(formatString);

    var dateObject = {
        M: inDate.getMonth() + 1,
        d: inDate.getDate(),
        D: inDate.getDate(),
        h: inDate.getHours(),
        m: inDate.getMinutes(),
        s: inDate.getSeconds(),
        y: inDate.getFullYear(),
        Y: inDate.getFullYear()
    };

    // Build Regex Dynamically based on the list above.
    // It should end up with something like this: "/([Yy]+|M+|[Dd]+|h+|m+|s+)/g"
    var dateMatchRegex = joinObj(dateObject, "+|") + "+";
    var regEx = new RegExp(dateMatchRegex,"g");
    formatString = formatString.replace(regEx, function(formatToken) {
        var datePartValue = dateObject[formatToken.slice(-1)];
        var tokenLength = formatToken.length;

        // A conflict exists between specifying 'd' for no zero pad -> expand
        // to '10' and specifying yy for just two year digits '01' instead
        // of '2001'.  One expands, the other contracts.
        //
        // So Constrict Years but Expand All Else
        if (formatToken.indexOf('y') < 0 && formatToken.indexOf('Y') < 0)
        {
            // Expand single digit format token 'd' to
            // multi digit value '10' when needed
            var tokenLength = Math.max(formatToken.length, datePartValue.toString().length);
        }
        var zeroPad = (datePartValue.toString().length < formatToken.length ? "0".repeat(tokenLength) : "");
        return (zeroPad + datePartValue).slice(-tokenLength);
    });

    return formatString;
}

Example usage:

DateToString('Sun May 11,2014', 'MM/DD/yy');
DateToString('Sun May 11,2014', 'yyyy.MM.dd');
DateToString(new Date('Sun Dec 11,2014'),'yy-M-d');

---

If you use momentjs, now they include a constant for that format YYYY-MM-DD:

date.format(moment.HTML5_FMT.DATE)

---

Reformatting a date string is fairly straightforward, e.g.

var s = 'Sun May 11,2014'; function reformatDate(s) { function z(n){return ('0' + n).slice(-2)} var months = [,'jan','feb','mar','apr','may','jun', 'jul','aug','sep','oct','nov','dec']; var b = s.split(/\W+/); return b[3] + '-' + z(months.indexOf(b[1].substr(0,3).toLowerCase())) + '-' + z(b[2]); } console.log(reformatDate(s));

---

function myYmd(D){ var pad = function(num) { var s = '0' + num; return s.substr(s.length - 2); } var Result = D.getFullYear() + '-' + pad((D.getMonth() + 1)) + '-' + pad(D.getDate()); return Result; } var datemilli = new Date('Sun May 11,2014'); document.write(myYmd(datemilli));

---

Yet another combination of the answers. Nicely readable, but a little lengthy.

function getCurrentDayTimestamp() {
  const d = new Date();

  return new Date(
    Date.UTC(
      d.getFullYear(),
      d.getMonth(),
      d.getDate(),
      d.getHours(),
      d.getMinutes(),
      d.getSeconds()
    )
  // `toIsoString` returns something like "2017-08-22T08:32:32.847Z"
  // and we want the first part ("2017-08-22")
  ).toISOString().slice(0, 10);
}

---