The toString()
method returns a string representing the specified Date
object.
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.toString()
Return value
A string representing the given date.
Description
Date
instances inherit their toString()
method from Date.prototype
, not Object.prototype
. Date.prototype.toString()
returns a string representation of the Date in the format specified in ECMA-262 which can be summarised as:
- Week day: 3 letter English week day name, e.g. "Sat"
- space
- Month name: 3 letter English month name, e.g. "Sep"
- space
- Date: 2 digit day in month, e.g. "01"
- space
- Year: 4 digit year, e.g. "2018"
- space
- Hour: 2 digit hour of day, e.g. "14"
- colon
- Minute: 2 digit minute of hour, e.g. "53"
- colon
- Second: 2 digit second of minute, e.g. "26"
- space
- The string "GMT"
- Timezone offset sign, either:
- "+" for positive offsets (0 or greater)
- "-" for negative offsets (less than zero)
- Two digit hour offset, e.g. "14"
- Two digit minute offset, e.g. "00"
- Optionally, a timezone name consisting of:
- space
- Left bracket, i.e. "("
- An implementation dependent string representation of the timezone, which might be an abbreviation or full name (there is no standard for names or abbreviations of timezones), e.g. "Line Islands Time" or "LINT"
- Right bracket, i.e. ")"
E.g. "Sat Sep 01 2018 14:53:26 GMT+1400 (LINT)"
Until ECMAScript 2018 (edition 9), the format of the string returned by Date.prototype.toString
was implementation dependent. Therefore it should not be relied upon to be in the specified format.
The toString()
method is automatically called when a date is to be represented as a text value, e.g. console.log(new Date())
, or when a date is used in a string concatenation, such as var today = 'Today is ' + new Date()
.
toString()
is a generic method, it does not require that its this
is a Date
instance. However, it must have an internal [[TimeValue]]
property that can't be constructed using native javascript, so it's effectively limited to use with Date
instances. If called on a non–Date instance, a TypeError
is thrown.
Examples
Using toString()
The following assigns the toString()
value of a Date
object to myVar
:
var x = new Date(); var myVar = x.toString(); // assigns a string value to myVar in the same format as: // Mon Sep 08 1998 14:36:22 GMT-0700 (PDT)
Specifications
Specification |
---|
ECMAScript (ECMA-262) The definition of 'Date.prototype.toString' in that specification. |
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 | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
toString | 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 |
Legend
- Full support
- Full support