Handling Dates with Javascript

The Date Object

To use dates within Javascript we can utilise the Date object. To initialise it we can write:

const now = new Date()

console.log(now)
//> Sat Oct 26 2019 16:50:32 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)

Initialising the Date object without any arguments will return an object with the current date and time. Note that to create a date object, the keyword new must be used, otherwise a string will be returned.

There are a number of methods that can be used on the Date object. For example, we can also get the current date using the now() method like in the example below:

const now = Date.now()

console.log(now)
//> 1572105039416

In the above code, you will notice that the date is returned as a Unix timestamp. This is the number of milliseconds elapsed since the 1st January 1970. This may be useful if you are wanting to store the current time in a database in this format.

You can also use the parse() method to change a string date into a date object. For more methods that can be used with a date object, check out the documentation.

Moment.js

To help manage dates in the browser and in node.js, you can use the moment.js library. Moment.js builds on top of the Javascript Date functionality and includes many convenience functions.

For more information on the use of moment.js you can view this cheatsheet.