Get yesterday's Date formatted as YYYY-MM-DD in JavaScript

Get yesterday's Date formatted as YYYY-MM-DD in JavaScript #

To get yesterday's date formatted as yyyy-mm-dd:

1. Decrement 1 day from the current date to get yesterday's date.
2. Get the year, month and day of the month values from the date.
3. Join the values with a hyphen separator.

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const yesterday = new Date();
yesterday.setDate(yesterday.getDate() - 1);

console.log(yesterday); // 👉️ "Thu Jan 13 2022"

function padTo2Digits(num) {
  return num.toString().padStart(2, '0');
}

function formatDate(date) {
  return [
    date.getFullYear(),
    padTo2Digits(date.getMonth() + 1),
    padTo2Digits(date.getDate()),
  ].join('-');
}

console.log(formatDate(yesterday)); // 👉️ "2022-01-13"

The Date() constructor returns the current date and time.

We used the setDate method to change the day of the month on the Date object.

We used the getDate method to get the day of the month for the specific date and decremented the result by 1.

The getDate method returns an integer between 1 and 31.

Note that the Date object automatically handles the scenario where the date is the first of the month.

If that is the case, the Date object rolls back to the previous month automatically.

We defined a padTo2Digits function that helps us handle the case where the month or day of the month values are less than 10.

The formatDate function takes a Date object as a parameter and returns a string formatted as YYYY-MM-DD.

The function makes use of the following 3 Date related methods.

• Date.getFullYear method - returns a four-digit number representing the year that corresponds to a date.

• Date.getMonth - returns an integer between 0 (January) and 11 (December) and represents the month for a given date. Yes, unfortunately the getMonth method is off by 1.

• Date.getDate - returns an integer between 1 and 31 representing the day of the month for a specific date.

Because the getMonth method is zero-based we added 1 to its return value.

The last step is to place the calls to the methods in an array, so we can join them by a hyphen separator. Here are some examples.

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console.log(['2023', '05', '24'].join('-')); // 👉️ '2023-05-24'
console.log(['2023', '09', '13'].join('-')); // 👉️ '2023-09-13'

You could easily reorder the values in the array, change the separator to a forward slash /, or whatever suits your use case.

This formats yesterday's date as YYYY-MM-DD. Here is the complete code snippet.

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const yesterday = new Date();
yesterday.setDate(yesterday.getDate() - 1);

console.log(yesterday); // 👉️ Thu Jan 13 2022

function padTo2Digits(num) {
  return num.toString().padStart(2, '0');
}

function formatDate(date) {
  return [
    date.getFullYear(),
    padTo2Digits(date.getMonth() + 1),
    padTo2Digits(date.getDate()),
  ].join('-');
}

console.log(formatDate(yesterday)); // 👉️ "2022-01-13"