Get the Day Name from a specific Date using JavaScript

# Get the Day Name from a specific Date using JavaScript

Use the toLocaleDateString() method to get the day name from a specific date.

The method returns a string with language sensitive representation of the date portion of the given date.

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function getDayName(date = new Date(), locale = 'en-US') {
  return date.toLocaleDateString(locale, {weekday: 'long'});
}

// ✅ Get name of current day
console.log(getDayName()); // 👉️ Tuesday

// ✅ Get day name for specific date
console.log(getDayName(new Date('2022-01-29'))); // 👉️ Saturday

// ✅ Get day name in different locale // 👇️ Samstag
console.log(getDayName(new Date('2022-01-29'), 'de-DE'));

We created a reusable function that takes a Date object and a locale as parameters and returns the name of the given date.

We used the toLocaleDateString() method to get a string with language sensitive representation of the current date.

The 2 parameters we passed to the method are:

1. locales - a string with a BCP 47 language tag or an array of such strings. You can use any of the available locales, e.g. es-MX for Mexico or en-CA for Canada. If you need more information about this parameter, check out the MDN docs.
2. options object, where we set the weekday property. Read more about the options object in the MDN docs.

The weekday property of the options object is the representation of the weekday.

We set it to long to get the full name of the weekday. The possible values include:

• long - (e.g. Thursday)
• short - (e.g. Thu)
• narrow - (e.g. T). Two weekdays may have the same narrow style for some locales, e.g. Thursday and Tuesday are both T.

Note that the function we created has to be passed a Date() object as a parameter.

If you have a date string like 2022-04-29, you should pass the string to the Date() constructor to create a Date object when calling the function.

Copied!
function getDayName(date = new Date(), locale = 'en-US') {
  return date.toLocaleDateString(locale, {weekday: 'long'});
}

const dateStr = '2022-04-29';

// 👇️ "Friday"
console.log(getDayName(new Date(dateStr)));

// 👇️ "Freitag"
console.log(getDayName(new Date(dateStr), 'de-DE'));

Passing a valid date or date and time string to the Date() constructor returns a Date object, on which we can call the toLocaleDateString method.

I've also written an article on how to convert month number to month name and vice versa.

# Additional Resources

You can learn more about the related topics by checking out the following tutorials:

• How to get the Day of the Week in JavaScript
• Get the Date of the Next Monday or Friday in JavaScript
• How to get the Quarter from a Date in JavaScript
• How to get a Date without the Time in JavaScript