Javascript: How to format the date according to the french convention

Question

I use the toLocaleDateString method for formatting the date. This is how I do:

> var options = { weekday: 'long', year: 'numeric', month: 'long', day: 'numeric' };
> var today  = new Date();
> today.toLocaleDateString("fr-FR", options);
"mercredi 23 octobre 2019" //The output

In French the usual format of the date is rather like this:

Mercredi, 23 octobre 2019

The first letter of the day of the week in capital letters and a comma just after. How can I adapt the code to this format?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 23 '19 at 21:32

toLocaleDateString has very limited options for its output.

The toLocaleDateString() method returns a string with a language sensitive representation of the date portion of this date. The new locales and options arguments let applications specify the language whose formatting conventions should be used and allow to customize the behavior of the function.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date/toLocaleDateString

You'll want to define your own date string. Take a look at this question for a bunch of options.

How to format a JavaScript date

I would personally recommend Moment.js as a great option. It has it's own locales abilities and its very easy to format the date string. — Vian Esterhuizen, Oct 23 '19 at 21:33

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 23 '19 at 21:52

1

Use moment.js:

moment(new Date()).format('dddd, D MMMM YYYY');

See the formatting docs for more options

answered Oct 23 '19 at 21:52

inorganik

21,174
17
78
101

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 24 '19 at 11:39

Thank you for your answers. Moment.js is a great library. Before migrating to Moment.js, I wrote a small code to work around the limitation of toLocaleDateString in order to get the format I want:

var options = {year: 'numeric', month: 'long', day: 'numeric' };
var opt_weekday = { weekday: 'long' };
var today  = new Date();
var weekday = toTitleCase(today.toLocaleDateString("fr-FR", opt_weekday));

function toTitleCase(str) {
    return str.replace(
        /\w\S*/g,
        function(txt) {
            return txt.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + txt.substr(1).toLowerCase();
        }
    );
}

var the_date = weekday + ", " + today.toLocaleDateString("fr-FR", options)
// the output: "Jeudi, 24 octobre 2019"

Javascript: How to format the date according to the french convention

3 Answers3