Convert a date to string in Javascript

Question

I'm looking for a way to convert a Javascript Date object to a string. I'm converting my site from Ruby to server side Javascript, and I'm looking for something analogous to strftime in Ruby, C, and many other languages.

I found plenty of simple scripts that do this kind of conversion, but I'd prefer not to include a custom implementation if there is a standard way of doing this.

I'm not using a Javascript framework. I'm using Mozilla Rhino, but would prefer to stay away from using the Java library as much as possible, to allow moving my code easily between implementations.

I want to be able to specify the format of the string, since I want to embed it in a sentence. I want to be able to insert arbitrary on's and at's, and have the full name of the day, not just it's abbreviation. So toString() won't suffice.

Answer 1

There is a free (and awesome) library for Javascript called Datejs that gives you all sorts of formatting and parsing capabilities (see the FormatSpecifiers documentation).