Date.prototype.toLocaleString()

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.

Syntax

dateObj.toLocaleString([locales[, options]])

Parameters

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".

Return value

A string representing the given date according to language-specific conventions.

Examples

Using 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

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​.name === '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:

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"

Using 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"

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.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• Intl.DateTimeFormat
• Date.prototype.toLocaleDateString()
• Date.prototype.toLocaleTimeString()
• Date.prototype.toString()