Check if a Year is a Leap Year using JavaScript

Check if a Year is a Leap Year using JavaScript #

To check if a year is a leap year:

1. Create a new Date object that stores the 29th of February.
2. If the date February the 29th exists in the year, then the year is a leap year.
3. February 29 is a date that occurs every four years, and is called a leap year.

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function isLeapYear(year = new Date().getFullYear()) {
  return new Date(year, 1, 29).getDate() === 29;
}

console.log(isLeapYear(2023)); // 👉️ false
console.log(isLeapYear(2024)); // 👉️ true

We created a reusable function that takes a year as a parameter and checks if the year is a leap year.

If no parameters are passed to the function, it uses the current year.

The 3 parameters we passed to the Date() constructor are:

1. year - an integer that represents the year.
2. monthIndex - a zero-based value that represents the month, where 0 is January, 1 is February, etc.
3. day - an integer that represents the day of the month.

We created a Date object that stores the date for February 29th.

The getDate() method returns a number between 1 and 31 that represents the day of the month for the given date.

For example, if you pass 29 as the day of the month for a month that only has 28 days, the Date object would set the date to the first of the next month.

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const date = new Date(2022, 1, 29);

// 👇️ Tue Mar 01 2022
console.log(date);

We passed 29 for the day of the month when creating the Date object, but because the month of February only has 28 days in 2022, the Date object created a date for the 1st of March.

You can also use a more explicit approach.

To check if a year is a leap year:

1. Check if the year is divisible by 4 and is not an end-of-century year.
2. Or check if the year is divisible by 400.
3. If either condition is met, the year is a leap year.

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function isLeapYear(year = new Date().getFullYear()) {
  return (year % 4 === 0 && year % 100 !== 0) || year % 400 === 0;
}

console.log(isLeapYear(2023)); // 👉️ false
console.log(isLeapYear(2400)); // 👉️ true
console.log(isLeapYear(2024)); // 👉️ true

For a year to be a leap year, it has to be divisible by 4, except for end-of-century years, which must be divisible by 400.

The modulo (%) operator returns the remainder of the division.

This solution is quite a bit more technical and less readable than the previous one.