How to Format a Date to YYYY MM DD in JavaScript

Working with dates in JavaScript has historically been a challenge.

You want to be able to format dates in a way that is easy to read and understand, and you want to be able to parse dates in a way that is easy to read and understand.

In this post, we'll learn how to format a date in one of the most popular formats, YYYY-MM-DD.

Formatting Dates to YYYY-MM-DD

To format a date in this format, let's start off with our Date object:

JAVASCRIPT
const date = new Date();

Now let's make use of the toISOString() method, which converts our date object into a string following the ISO 8601 standard.

JAVASCRIPT
const dateString = date.toISOString();

JAVASCRIPT
const date = new Date();

const string = date.toISOString();

This returns us a string in this format, if you're from the US:

BASH
YYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.sssZ

Now, all we need to do is split the string by the T character, and take the first element in the array:

JAVASCRIPT
const date = new Date();

const dateString = date.toISOString();

const dateParts = dateString.split("T");

const formatted = dateParts[0];

console.log(formatted);

BASH
YYYY-MM-DD

If you want to remove the dashes, you can simply use a global regex to remove them

JAVASCRIPT
const date = new Date();

const dateParts = date.toISOString().split("T");

const formatted = dateParts[0].replace(/-/g, '');

console.log(formatted);

BASH
YYYYMMDD

Conclusion

In this post, we looked at the easiest way to format a Date into the YYYY-MM-DD and YYYYMMDD format.

The key is to take advantage of the toISOString() method and then split the string by the T character to get format for us.

Hopefully, this has been helpful. Thanks for reading!

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