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Comment by jasamer | Hacker News Reader

I used the JS Date API for the first time a few months ago, and wrote something like

    date.getYear() + "-" + date.getMonth() + "-" + date.getDay()

in the hope of getting something like "2022-1-4".

The actual result for that date is "122-0-2" - not a single component of the date was what I expected.

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date.toLocaleDateString ("fr-CA") would have got you there, but yea agreed 0 indexed months are whack.

I'm sure you've read the docs since then but just for the viewers at home:

s/getYear/getFullYear

s/getDay/getDate

getYear is oldfashioned, years since 1900. getDay is day-of-the-week, 0 for Sunday, 1 for Monday, etc

> 0 indexed months are whack

Why, if everything else in JS is 0 indexed? Isn't consistency a good thing in a language? If they'd gone the other way, wouldn't there be people here complaining that 1 indexing is whack?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

lol

Well because days are returned 1-indexed and calendars in general are 1-indexed, but of course the internal 'getMonth' method isn't meant to be a calendar, it's meant to provide an array index to ["January", "February", ...] as an interface to the other methods of printing a human-readable form.

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