Working with Dates

JavaScript has a built in function that allows you to work with dates. This feature is great for creating a calender, to display the current date, or to create a clock. You can also use the date function to set the date in your script.

If you want to set a date, you would just change the get to set in any of the methods above, and input the value you want to set between the parentheses. For example, if I needed to set the current date to July 4, 1776, I would use setDate("July 4, 1776"). Now, lets use some of the date methods to display the current date.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">

	var days = new Array ("Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday")
	var months = new Array("January","February","March","April","May","June","July","August","October","November","December")

	var now = new Date();
	var currentMonth = now.getMonth()
	var currentYear = now.getFullYear()
	var currentDay = now.getDate()
	var currentWeekDay = now.getDay();
	
document.write('Today is ' +days[currentWeekDay] + '. '+ months[currentMonth] + ' ' + currentDay + ', ' + currentYear)
</script>

The first thing we do is set up two arrays. One for the days of the week, the other is for the months of the year. We do this because we want to display the day of the week and the month as text, and not as a number. When we get the day of the week or month we can use that variable to call the correct text for each because of the array.
Next, we create the variable now, and set it to the current date, The next four variables we are getting the current month, year, day of the month, and day of the week. Finally, we write this information to the browser. Below is what the output would look like.