Format JavaScript date as yyyy-mm-dd

Question

I have a date with the format Sun May 11,2014. How can I convert it to 2014-05-11 using JavaScript?

Answer 1

2020 ANSWER

You can use the native .toLocaleDateString() function which supports several useful params like locale (to select a format like MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD), timezone (to convert the date) and formats details options (eg: 1 vs 01 vs January).

Examples

new Date().toLocaleDateString() // 8/19/2020

new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-US', {year: 'numeric', month: '2-digit', day: '2-digit'}); // 08/19/2020 (month and day with two digits)

new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-ZA'); // 2020/08/19 (year/month/day) notice the different locale

new Date().toLocaleDateString('en-CA'); // 2020-08-19 (year-month-day) notice the different locale

new Date().toLocaleString("en-US", {timeZone: "America/New_York"}); // 8/19/2020, 9:29:51 AM. (date and time in a specific timezone)

new Date().toLocaleString("en-US", {hour: '2-digit', hour12: false, timeZone: "America/New_York"});  // 09 (just the hour)

Notice that sometimes to output a date in your specific desire format, you have to find a compatible locale with that format. You can find the locale examples here: https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/tryit.asp?filename=tryjsref_tolocalestring_date_all

Please notice that locale just change the format, if you want to transform a specific date to a specific country or city time equivalent then you need to use the timezone param.