How in JS do you show a date in the local format?

Question

In my website I am printing the date the html file was last editied at the end of each page, using this string:

Modified: ' + document.lastModified

The trouble with that is that it uses American date order m/d/yyyy. That is fine for people viewing the page in the US, but I want it to reflect the settings for the user's machine.

Is there a simple solution from the standard JS library?

There is the [toLocaleDateString](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date/toLocaleDateString) method — Kei, Sep 30 '19 at 23:20
Possible duplicate of [Display date/time in user's locale format and time offset](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/85116/display-date-time-in-users-locale-format-and-time-offset) — Cyril F, Sep 30 '19 at 23:24

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 30 '19 at 23:22

0

Let your lastModified be a timestamp. Then you can do this:

document.lastModified = 1569885129000 // timestamp 
let dateObj = new Date(document.lastModified);
let str = 'Modified: ' + dateObj.toLocaleDateString();

You can read more about Date object here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date

answered Sep 30 '19 at 23:22

fiter

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That is not guaranteed to present the date in a "locale aware" format. Many browsers in particular default to US format, and most support only a few common formats. – RobG Oct 01 '19 at 02:40

How in JS do you show a date in the local format?

1 Answers1