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.
dateObj.toLocaleString([locales[, options]])
Check the Browser compatibility section to see which browsers support the locales
and options
arguments, and the Example: Checking for support for locales
and options
arguments for feature detection.
The default value for each date-time component property is undefined, but if the weekday
, year
, month
, day
, hour
, minute
, second
properties are all undefined, then year
, month
, day
, hour
, minute
, and second
are assumed to be "numeric"
.
toLocaleString()
In basic use without specifying a locale, a formatted string in the default locale and with default options is returned.
var 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
locales
and options
argumentsThe 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.name === 'RangeError'; } return false; }
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:
var 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"
options
The results provided by toLocaleString()
can be customized using the options
argument:
var date = new Date(Date.UTC(2012, 11, 20, 3, 0, 0)); // request a weekday along with a long date var 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"
When formatting large numbers of dates, it is better to create an Intl.DateTimeFormat object and use the function provided by its format property.
Created by Mozilla Contributors and licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5