Given a Date object, there are lots of methods that will generate a string from that date.

Built-in formatting methods

const date = new Date('July 22, 2018 07:22:13')

date.toString()
// "Sun Jul 22 2018 07:22:13 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)"

date.toTimeString() //"07:22:13 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)"

date.toUTCString() //"Sun, 22 Jul 2018 05:22:13 GMT"

date.toDateString() //"Sun Jul 22 2018"

date.toISOString() //"2018-07-22T05:22:13.000Z" (ISO 8601 format)

date.toLocaleString() //"22/07/2018, 07:22:13"

date.toLocaleTimeString()	//"07:22:13"

Using Intl.DateTimeFormat

The Internationalization API, well supported in modern browsers, allows you to translate dates.

It’s exposed by the Intl object, which also helps localizing numbers, strings and currencies.

We’re interested in Intl.DateTimeFormat().

Here’s how to use it.

Format a date according to the computer default locale:

const date = new Date('July 22, 2018 07:22:13')
new Intl.DateTimeFormat().format(date) //"22/07/2018" in my locale

Format a date according to a different locale:

new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US').format(date) //"7/22/2018"

Intl.DateTimeFormat method takes an optional parameter that lets you customize the output. To also display hours, minutes and seconds:

const options = {
  year: 'numeric',
  month: 'numeric',
  day: 'numeric',
  hour: 'numeric',
  minute: 'numeric',
  second: 'numeric'
}

new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US', options).format(date) //"7/22/2018, 7:22:13 AM"
new Intl.DateTimeFormat('it-IT', options).format(date) //"22/7/2018, 07:22:13"

Custom formatting with getter methods

You are not limited to built-in methods - you can use more low level methods to get a value out of a date, and construct any kind of result you want:

date.getDate() //22
date.getDay() //0 (0 means sunday, 1 means monday..)
date.getFullYear() //2018
date.getMonth() //6 (starts from 0)
date.getHours() //7
date.getMinutes() //22
date.getSeconds() //13
date.getMilliseconds() //0 (not specified)
date.getTime() //1532236933000
date.getTimezoneOffset() //-120 (will vary depending on where you are and when you check - this is CET during the summer). Returns the timezone difference expressed in minutes

Those all depend on the current timezone of the computer. There are equivalent UTC versions of these methods, that return the UTC value rather than the values adapted to your current timezone:

date.getUTCDate() //22
date.getUTCDay() //0 (0 means sunday, 1 means monday..)
date.getUTCFullYear() //2018
date.getUTCMonth() //6 (starts from 0)
date.getUTCHours() //5 (not 7 like above)
date.getUTCMinutes() //22
date.getUTCSeconds() //13
date.getUTCMilliseconds() //0 (not specified)

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	Date Basics
2:	Getting Date Parts
3:	▶︎ Date Formatting
4:	Date Math
5:	Date Comparisons
6:	Date Recipes