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How to Get Today's Date in JavaScript

Introduction

In JavaScript, getting today's date is a common task that developers need to perform in many applications. Fortunately, the language provides a built-in Date object that makes it easy to obtain the current date and time. In this blog post, we'll explore how to find today's date in JavaScript, and provide you with an example of how to use this functionality in your code.

Get Today's Date in JavaScript

To get today's date in JavaScript, we first need to create a new instance of the Date object. Here's how we can do that:

const today = new Date();

This code creates a new Date object with the current date and time. Once we have this object, we can access various properties to get information about the date. For example, we can use the getFullYear, getMonth, and getDate methods to get the year, month, and day of the month, respectively:

const year = today.getFullYear();
const month = today.getMonth() + 1; // Months are zero-indexed
const day = today.getDate();

Note that we add 1 to the month value because JavaScript's getMonth method returns a zero-indexed value (January is 0, February is 1, and so on).

If we want to display today's date in a specific format, we can use string concatenation to combine the year, month, and day values into a single string:

const formattedDate = `${year}-${month}-${day}`;
console.log(formattedDate); // Outputs "2023-3-24"

Get Today's Date in JavaScript Using Moment.js

Alternatively, we can use a library like Moment.js to format the date in a more flexible way:

const formattedDate = moment(today).format("YYYY-MM-DD");
console.log(formattedDate); // Outputs "2023-03-24"

This code uses Moment.js to format today's date as a string in the "YYYY-MM-DD" format.

Conclusion

In conclusion, getting today's date in JavaScript is a straightforward task that can be accomplished using the built-in Date object.

By creating a new instance of this object and accessing its properties, we can obtain the current date and time and use it in our applications as needed.

If you want to learn more about the JavaScript Date object, check out check out the MDN Web Docs on the Date object.




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