The toLocaleDateString()
method returns a string with a
language sensitive representation of the date portion of this date. The new
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.
The source for this interactive example is stored in a GitHub repository. If you'd like to contribute to the interactive examples project, please clone https://github.com/mdn/interactive-examples and send us a pull request.
Syntax
dateObj.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.
See the Intl.DateTimeFormat()
constructor for details on these parameters and how to use them.
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.
var 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:
var 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'));
// → "12/19/2012"
// 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:
var date = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0));
// request a weekday along with a long date
var 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
Browser compatibility
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