Convert a String to a Date object in JavaScript #
Use the Date[]
constructor to convert a string to a Date
object, e.g. const date = new Date['2022-09-24']
. The Date[]
constructor takes a valid date string as a parameter and returns a Date
object.
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const str = '2022-09-24'; const date = new Date[str]; console.log[date]; // 👉️ Sat Sep 24 2022
We used the
Date[] constructor to convert a string to a Date
object.
If you get an invalid Date when creating the Date
object, you need to format the string correctly before passing it to the Date[]
constructor.
If you have difficulties creating a valid Date
object, you can pass 2 types of arguments to the
Date[]
constructor:
- a valid ISO 8601 string, formatted as
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ
, or justYYYY-MM-DD
, if you only have a date without time. - multiple, comma-separated arguments that represent the
year
,month
[0 = January to 11 = December],day of the month
,hours
,minutes
andseconds
.
Here is an example that splits an MM/DD/YYYY
formatted string [could be any other format] and passes the values as arguments to the Date[]
constructor to create a Date
object.
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const str = '09/24/2022'; const [month, day, year] = str.split['/']; console.log[month]; // 👉️ 09 console.log[day]; // 👉️ 24 console.log[year]; // 👉️ 2022 const date = new Date[+year, +month - 1, +day]; console.log[date]; // 👉️ Sat Sep 24 2022
We split the date
on each forward slash to get the values for the month, day and year.
Notice that we subtracted 1
from the month when passing it to the Date[]
constructor.
This is necessary because the Date
constructor expects a zero-based value for the month, where January = 0, February = 1, March = 2, etc.
Here is another example, which creates a Date
that also contains the hours, minutes and seconds.
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const str = '09/24/2022 07:30:14'; const [dateValues, timeValues] = str.split[' ']; console.log[dateValues]; // 👉️ "09/24/2022" console.log[timeValues]; // 👉️ "07:30:14" const [month, day, year] = dateValues.split['/']; const [hours, minutes, seconds] = timeValues.split[':']; const date = new Date[+year, +month - 1, +day, +hours, +minutes, +seconds]; // 👇️️ Sat Sep 24 2022 07:30:14 console.log[date];
We first split the date and time string on the space, so we can get the date and time components as separate strings.
We then had to split the date string on each forward slash to get the value for the month, day and year. Note that your separator might be different, e.g. a hyphen, but the approach is the same.
We also split the time string on each colon and assigned the hours, minutes and seconds to variables.
We then passed all of the
values to the Date[]
constructor to create a Date
object.
If you need to store a date string in your database, it's best to store the ISO 8601 representation of the date.
You can get the ISO formatted date by calling the toISOString[]
method.
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const str = '09/24/2022 07:30:14'; const [dateValues, timeValues] = str.split[' ']; console.log[dateValues]; // 👉️ "09/24/2022" console.log[timeValues]; // 👉️ "07:30:14" const [month, day, year] = dateValues.split['/']; const [hours, minutes, seconds] = timeValues.split[':']; const date = new Date[+year, month - 1, +day, +hours, +minutes, +seconds]; // 👇️️ Sat Sep 24 2022 07:30:14 console.log[date]; // 👇️ "2022-09-24T04:30:14.000Z" [ISO 8601] console.log[date.toISOString[]];
The toISOString method returns a string of the date in the ISO 8601 format according to universal time.
The ISO string can easily be passed to the Date[]
constructor to create a new Date
object.