small-date v2.0.0

small-date

A tiny (0.8kb) date formatting library with built-in i18n support.

Why?

There are several date formatting libraries out there. It all started with Moment, while nowadays smaller alternatives such as date-fns, DayJS and Luxon among others are raising in popularity. While date-fns already comes in a really small format, it was still way to big for my most common use case: Format a date with a given pattern. So I created this tiny library as an attempt to solve this specific problem with as little bytes as possible.

How it works

I was using Intl.DateTimeFormat previously and really liked it. So I had the idea to use that under the hood while providing a nice API that accepts a pattern in a widely used format. The nice thing about Intl.DateTimeFormat is that it has built-in i18n support.

Browser Support

It works in all modern browsers.

However, if you need to support IE11, pick one of the libraries mentioned above!

Installation

yarn add small-date

Usage

The libraries exports a single function that accepts the following parameters:

import { format } from 'small-date'

// Wednesday 03 March 2021, 11:45 am
format(new Date(), 'DDD dd MMMM yyyy, hh:mm a')

// Mittwoch 03 März 2021, 11:45
format(new Date(), 'DDD dd MMMM yyyy, HH:mm', {
  locale: 'de-DE',
})

Escaping Text

Sometimes we want to add arbitary text into our pattern. The problem is: Words break if they include tokens. Therefore, it is safest to escape all words with " quotes.

import { format } from 'small-date'

// Today is Wednesday the 03. of March
format(new Date(), '"Today is" DDD "the" dd. "of" MMMM')

TimeZone

We can pass a timeZone to the configuration to get the locale date at this particular zone.

import { format } from 'small-date'

// Wednesday 03 March 2021, 09:45 pm
format(new Date(), 'DDD dd MMMM yyyy, hh:mm a', {
  timeZone: 'Australia/Sydney',
})

Pattern Tokens

All examples below use the following date: new Date(2021, 2, 3, 18, 7, 8, 9) and the en-US locale.

License

small-date is licensed under the MIT License. Documentation is licensed under Creative Common License. Created with ♥ by @robinweser and all the great contributors.