type of Date object

Question

I just read this article on W3Schools about type conversion in JS. There stands:

There are 3 types of objects:

• Object
• Date
• Array

This confused me because to my knowledge there isn't any difference between Date objects and any other object (typeof (new Date()) returns "object"). First I thought that it's special because it contains native code, but there are dozens of functions with native code.

Is this article wrong? Or could anybody tell my why the Date object is so extraordinary that it's considered a separate type of object?

Answer 1

Lemme tell you a basic thing. The articles in W3Schools are definitely outdated so you must not rely on it. Yes, when you give this in console:

typeof (new Date())

The above code returns object because the JavaScript has only a few primitive types:

You can check if it is a date object or not using:

(new Date()) instanceof Date

The above code will return true. This is the right way of checking if the particular variable is an instance of a particular type.

Answer 2

You might check an object for being an instance of a specific type also by verifying whether it has a method that is specific to the object type in question:

if (myobject.hasOwnProperty("getUTCMilliseconds")) {
    // myobject is a Date...

The same technique may help you identifying arrays in Javascript:
checking

typeof(myobject)  

yields "object", not "array" if myobject is really an array, so I use

if (myobject.hasOwnProperty("slice")) {
    // we are dealing with an array here ...

Answer 3

You can either use (as already suggested)

(new Date) instanceof Date

or

(new Date).constructor === Date

I honestly prefer to use the constructor option, but it's just a preference.