Working with dates is an essential part of web development, and sometimes, you need to get the current date in a specific format, such as “yyyy-mm-dd”. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to achieve this quickly and efficiently using jQuery.
Prerequisites
To follow this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of HTML, JavaScript, and jQuery. Additionally, make sure to include the latest version of jQuery in your project. You can get it from jQuery’s official website or include it through a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Google or Microsoft.
Step 1: Create a Function to Format the Date
First, we’ll create a function that takes a Date
object as input and returns a formatted string in the “yyyy-mm-dd” format. Let’s call it formatDate:
function formatDate(date) { var month = '' + (date.getMonth() + 1), day = '' + date.getDate(), year = date.getFullYear(); if (month.length < 2) { month = '0' + month; } if (day.length < 2) { day = '0' + day; } return [year, month, day].join('-'); }
This function does the following:
- Extracts the month, day, and year from the input
Date
object. - Adds a leading zero to the month and day if they are less than 10 (e.g., “02” instead of “2”).
- Joins the year, month, and day with a hyphen (-) to create the “yyyy-mm-dd” format.
Step 2: Get the Current Date and Format It
Now that we have the formatDate function, we can use it to easily get the current date in the “yyyy-mm-dd” format:
$(document).ready(function() { var currentDate = new Date(); var formattedDate = formatDate(currentDate); console.log(formattedDate); });
This code will output the current date in the “yyyy-mm-dd” format to the console when the document is ready. You can use the formattedDate variable to display the date in your HTML or manipulate it further in your JavaScript code.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we discussed how to get the current date in the “yyyy-mm-dd” format using jQuery and a simple JavaScript function. This technique can be easily adapted to other date formats and is useful for various web development tasks, such as displaying dates on a webpage, processing user inputs, or working with APIs.