Date.prototype.toDateString()

The toDateString() method returns the date portion of a Date object in English in the following format separated by spaces:

  1. First three letters of the week day name
  2. First three letters of the month name
  3. Two digit day of the month, padded on the left a zero if necessary
  4. Four digit year (at least), padded on the left with zeros if necessary

E.g. "Thu Jan 01 1970".

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Syntax

toDateString()

Return value

A string representing the date portion of the given Date object in human readable form in English.

Description

Date instances refer to a specific point in time. Calling toString() will return the date formatted in a human readable form in English. Sometimes it is desirable to obtain a string of the time portion; such a thing can be accomplished with the toTimeString() method.

The toDateString() method is especially useful because compliant engines implementing ECMA-262 may differ in the string obtained from toString() for Date objects, as the format is implementation-dependent and simple string slicing approaches may not produce consistent results across multiple engines.

Examples

A basic usage of toDateString()

const d = new Date(1993, 5, 28, 14, 39, 7);

console.log(d.toString());     // logs Mon Jun 28 1993 14:39:07 GMT-0600 (PDT)
console.log(d.toDateString()); // logs Mon Jun 28 1993

Note: Month are 0-indexed when used as an argument of Date (thus 0 corresponds to January and 11 to December).

Specifications

Specification
ECMAScript Language Specification
# sec-date.prototype.todatestring

Browser compatibility

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See also