Date.prototype.toLocaleDateString()

The toLocaleDateString() method returns a string with a language sensitive representation of the date portion of the specified date in the user agent's timezone.

The locales and options arguments let applications specify the language whose formatting conventions should be used and allow to customize the behavior 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.

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Syntax

toLocaleDateString()
toLocaleDateString(locales)
toLocaleDateString(locales, options)

Parameters

The locales and options arguments customize the behavior of the function and let applications specify the language whose formatting conventions should be used. In implementations, which ignore the locales and options arguments, the locale used and the form of the string returned are entirely implementation dependent.

locales Optional

These are the same locales as documented in the Intl.DateTimeFormat() constructor. They include (non-exhaustively): nu, ca, hc.

options Optional

These are the same options as documented in the Intl.DateTimeFormat() constructor. They include (non-exhaustively) the following properties: dateStyle, timeStyle, calendar, dayPeriod, numberingSystem, localeMatcher, weekday, era, year, month, day, hour, minute, second, fractionalSecondDigits, timeZoneName.

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 day are assumed to be "numeric".

Return value

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

Performance

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

Examples

Using toLocaleDateString()

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

const 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: 

const 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'));
// → "12/20/2012"

// 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 options argument:

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

// request a weekday along with a long date
const 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, UTC"

Specifications

Specification
ECMAScript Language Specification
# sec-date.prototype.tolocaledatestring
ECMAScript Internationalization API Specification
# sup-date.prototype.tolocaledatestring

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also