JavaScript: 3 ways to truncate the time portion of a date string

When building applications with JavaScript, there might be scenarios where you want to remove the time portion from a date string, such as:

• Displaying dates: When displaying dates in a UI, you may only want to show the date part and not the time.
• Storing dates: When storing the prices of stocks, you usually don’t need the time part.

This concise, example-based article will show you a couple of different ways to do so.

Using string manipulation

Example:

// Input date string in ISO format
const dateString = '2023-03-07T14:30:00.000Z';

// Truncate time portion
const truncatedDate = dateString.split('T')[0];

console.log(truncatedDate);

Output:

2023-03-07

Using Date object

Example:

// Input date string in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format
const dateString = '2023-12-30 12:00:00';

// Convert to Date object
const dateObj = new Date(dateString);

// Get only the date part
const truncatedDate =
  dateObj.getFullYear() +
  '-' +
  (dateObj.getMonth() + 1) +
  '-' +
  dateObj.getDate();

console.log(truncatedDate);

Output:

2023-12-30

Using Regular Expressions

You can also use a regular expression to match the time portion of the given date string and replace it with an empty string.

Example:

// Input date string
const dateString = '2024-03-07T14:30:00.000Z';

// Truncate time portion using regular expressions
const truncatedDate = dateString.replace(/T.+/, '');

console.log(truncatedDate);

Output:

2024-03-07

That’s it. If you have any questions, please comment. Happy coding & have a nice day!