What's the difference between JavaScript's getYear() and getFullYear() functions?

Question

I was working with JavaScript's Date object, and somewhere for the first time I needed to extract the year part of the date. What I saw was a weird behavior. It returns 113 instead of 2013 and I can't figure out how these two numbers might be related, except that the last two numbers might be the same.

var date = new Date();
console.log(date.getYear()); // prints 113
console.log(date.getFullYear()); // prints 2013

How these functions are different? And why having a function to getFullYear? It just makes no sense to me to get part of a year.

possible duplicate of [Javascript date.getYear() returns 111 in 2011?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4754938/javascript-date-getyear-returns-111-in-2011) — Danny Beckett, Apr 30 '13 at 09:50
Does this answer your question? [Why does Javascript getYear() return 108?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/98124/why-does-javascript-getyear-return-108) — Aryan Beezadhur, Jan 01 '21 at 18:51

score 60 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 30 '13 at 09:51

60

It just makes no sense to me to get part of a year.

Back in the day, when memory was expensive and the Year 2000 was far in the future, it did make sense for people to represent 1975 as 75. In retrospect a short-sighted decision.

date.getFullYear() == date.getYear() + 1900

answered Apr 30 '13 at 09:51

Thilo

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it's really a short-sighted decision! – Jerry Liu Mar 11 '16 at 02:28

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 01 '21 at 22:10

8

getYear() returns year minus 1900. This has been deprecated for a while now, it's best to use getFullYear().

edited Jan 01 '21 at 22:10

Aryan Beezadhur

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answered Apr 30 '13 at 09:55

SpaceCowboy

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score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 30 '13 at 09:53

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Its a Y2K thing, basically getYear method returns the year minus 1900.

so, I encourage to move over to getFullYear & use that instead.

answered Apr 30 '13 at 09:53

CuriousMind

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What's the difference between JavaScript's getYear() and getFullYear() functions?

3 Answers3

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