You probably don't need Moment.js

#javascript #webdev #tutorial

Moment.js is a very, very popular date & time manipulation library in JavaScript. It has over 6 millions download. Each weeks. A baffling score.

And don't get me wrong, I use moment at work and we love it. But sometimes, beginners tend to use this overpopular library for any date manipulation, and even things that you can do in JavaScript without Moment.js.

Today I'm going to show you that you can save some bytes with this simple, yet powerful date formating in pure JavaScript.

Date, day, month

If I tell you that I want to display the day of the week (letters), the date, the month (letters) and the year, you may wanna rush into npm install moment and use its format method.

But you can do it in JavaScript. 0kb needed. Nada.

const date = new Date().toLocaleString("en-US", {
    weekday: "long",
    day: "numeric",
    month: "long",
    year: "numeric"
});

console.log(date);

// Sunday, March 22, 2020

And it also supports other locales as well.

const date = new Date().toLocaleString("fr-FR", {
    weekday: "long",
    day: "numeric",
    month: "long",
    year: "numeric"
});

console.log(date);

// dimanche 22 mars 2020

Cool, huh? Okay, the formatting may not be as versatile as in Moment, but this can be very useful to know that the global JavaScript Date object is able to do that.

Of course, Moment is great for some more complex formatting and date/time manipulation.

I hope that you learned something new in this tiny post. I won't cover in details what is available but you should definitely check out the toLocaleString method and other methods for the global Date object.

Alternatives mentioned by the community here on DEV:

Thanks to you, I learned that there is an entire repository giving awesome examples for your usual date/time manipulation operations (as well as the repositories mentioned above) here on you-probably-don-t-need-moment-js.

Top comments (13)

Thomas Bonnet • Mar 23 '20

Heyn you can also use Humanize duration, he's lighter than moment.

npmjs.com/package/humanize-duration

Keff • Mar 23 '20 • Edited

Also day.js is quite light

Amin • Mar 23 '20

Keep sharing your favorite date/time libraries! Thanks for that one.

Keff • Mar 23 '20

I also found this one back in the day, It's done by one of moment's contributors:

github.com/moment/luxon

Thomas Bonnet • Mar 23 '20

Yeep

Amin • Mar 23 '20

I didn't know that one, I'll check it out. Thanks for sharing with us!

mahalde • Mar 23 '20

There is a whole GitHub repository where moment alternatives are compared!

Amin • Mar 23 '20

That's awesome!

kor3k • Mar 24 '20

that's nice, but it cannot handle FUCKING TIMEZONES! these are the biggest PITA when it comes to dealing with datetime in js (and programming in general).
also, luxon is more like successor of moment.js, not alternative.

Amin • Mar 24 '20

You are right, timezones are a pain, and this little trick is by no means a replacement for that purpose.

For now, I have no use case for timezone management in our application, and I think most beginners won't either. That's why I initially wrote this article. And it's really cool to have all of your opinions about that subject.

We are in the middle of a discussion with a colleague about whether or not we should/could change for Luxon, which seems really cool.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!