The toLocaleString()
method returns a string with a language sensitive representation of this date.
The new locales
and options
arguments let applications specify the language whose formatting conventions should be used and customize the behavior of the function.
In older implementations, which ignore the locales
and options
arguments, the locale used and the form of the string returned are entirely implementation-dependent.
The source for this interactive example is stored in a GitHub repository. If you'd like to contribute to the interactive examples project, please clone https://github.com/mdn/interactive-examples and send us a pull request.
Syntax
dateObj.toLocaleString([locales[, options]])
Parameters
The locales
and options
arguments customize the behavior of the function and let applications specify the language whose formatting conventions should be used. In implementations, which ignore the locales
and options
arguments, the locale used and the form of the string returned are entirely implementation dependent.
See the Intl.DateTimeFormat()
constructor for details on these parameters and how to use them.
The default value for each date-time component property is undefined
. But, if the weekday
, year
, month
, and day
properties are all undefined
, then year
, month
, and day
are assumed to be "numeric"
.
Return value
A string representing the given date according to language-specific conventions.
Performance
When formatting large numbers of dates, it is better to create an Intl.DateTimeFormat
object and use the function provided by its format
property.
Examples
Using toLocaleString()
In basic use without specifying a locale, a formatted string in the default locale and with default options is returned.
let date = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 12, 3, 0, 0)); // toLocaleString() without arguments depends on the // implementation, the default locale, and the default time zone console.log(date.toLocaleString()); // → "12/11/2012, 7:00:00 PM" if run in en-US locale with time zone America/Los_Angeles
Checking for support for locales
and options
arguments
The locales
and options
arguments are not supported in all browsers yet. To check whether an implementation supports them already, you can use the requirement that illegal language tags are rejected with a RangeError
exception:
function toLocaleStringSupportsLocales() { try { new Date().toLocaleString('i'); } catch (e) { return e instanceof RangeError; } return false; }
Using locales
This example shows some of the variations in localized date and time formats. In order to get the format of the language used in the user interface of your application, make sure to specify that language (and possibly some fallback languages) using the locales
argument:
let date = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0));
// formats below assume the local time zone of the locale;
// America/Los_Angeles for the US
// US English uses month-day-year order and 12-hour time with AM/PM
console.log(date.toLocaleString('en-US'));
// → "12/19/2012, 7:00:00 PM"
// British English uses day-month-year order and 24-hour time without AM/PM
console.log(date.toLocaleString('en-GB'));
// → "20/12/2012 03:00:00"
// Korean uses year-month-day order and 12-hour time with AM/PM
console.log(date.toLocaleString('ko-KR'));
// → "2012. 12. 20. 오후 12:00:00"
// Arabic in most Arabic speaking countries uses real Arabic digits
console.log(date.toLocaleString('ar-EG'));
// → "٢٠/١٢/٢٠١٢ ٥:٠٠:٠٠ ص"
// for Japanese, applications may want to use the Japanese calendar,
// where 2012 was the year 24 of the Heisei era
console.log(date.toLocaleString('ja-JP-u-ca-japanese'));
// → "24/12/20 12:00:00"
// When requesting a language that may not be supported, such as
// Balinese, include a fallback language (in this case, Indonesian)
console.log(date.toLocaleString(['ban', 'id']));
// → "20/12/2012 11.00.00"
Using options
The results provided by toLocaleString()
can be customized using the options
argument:
let date = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0)); // request a weekday along with a long date let options = { weekday: 'long', year: 'numeric', month: 'long', day: 'numeric' }; console.log(date.toLocaleString('de-DE', options)); // → "Donnerstag, 20. Dezember 2012" // an application may want to use UTC and make that visible options.timeZone = 'UTC'; options.timeZoneName = 'short'; console.log(date.toLocaleString('en-US', options)); // → "Thursday, December 20, 2012, GMT" // sometimes even the US needs 24-hour time console.log(date.toLocaleString('en-US', { hour12: false })); // → "12/19/2012, 19:00:00"
Avoid comparing formatted date values to static values
Most of the time, the formatting returned by toLocaleString()
is consistent. However, this might change in the future, and isn't guaranteed for all languages; output variations are by design, and allowed by the specification.
Most notably, the IE and Edge browsers insert bidirectional control characters around dates, so the output text will flow properly when concatenated with other text.
For this reason, you cannot expect to be able to compare the results of toLocaleString()
to a static value:
"1/1/2019, 01:00:00" === new Date("2019-01-01T01:00:00Z").toLocaleString("en-US"); // true in Firefox and others // false in IE and Edge
Note: See also this StackOverflow thread for more details and examples.
Specifications
Browser compatibility
The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data and send us a pull request.
Desktop | Mobile | Server | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
toLocaleString | Chrome Full support 1 | Edge Full support 12 | Firefox Full support 1 | IE Full support 3 | Opera Full support 3 | Safari Full support 1 | WebView Android Full support 1 | Chrome Android Full support 18 | Firefox Android Full support 4 | Opera Android Full support 10.1 | Safari iOS Full support 1 | Samsung Internet Android Full support 1.0 | nodejs Full support 0.1.100 |
IANA time zone names in timeZone option | Chrome Full support 24 | Edge Full support 14 | Firefox Full support 52 | IE No support No | Opera Full support 15 | Safari Full support 6.1 | WebView Android Full support 4.4 | Chrome Android Full support 25 | Firefox Android No support No | Opera Android Full support 14 | Safari iOS Full support 7 | Samsung Internet Android Full support 1.5 | nodejs Full support 0.12 |
locales | Chrome Full support 24 | Edge Full support 12 | Firefox Full support 29 | IE Full support 11 | Opera Full support 15 | Safari Full support 10 | WebView Android Full support 4.4 | Chrome Android Full support 25 | Firefox Android Full support 56 | Opera Android Full support 14 | Safari iOS Full support 10 | Samsung Internet Android Full support 1.5 | nodejs
Full support
13.0.0
|
options | Chrome Full support 24 | Edge Full support 12 | Firefox Full support 29 | IE Full support 11 | Opera Full support 15 | Safari Full support 10 | WebView Android Full support 4.4 | Chrome Android Full support 25 | Firefox Android Full support 56 | Opera Android Full support 14 | Safari iOS Full support 10 | Samsung Internet Android Full support 1.5 | nodejs Full support 0.12 |
Legend
- Full support
- Full support
- No support
- No support
- See implementation notes.
- See implementation notes.