displaying a date format, using a regular expression

Question

I have hopefully a very simple question. What I want to do is convert the date object I create to match the format of a regular expression. The problem is is that the value I keep getting in my console is null. Any suggestions on how I can modify my code to have the date's format that of the regular expression I created?

function getDate() {
        var newdate = new Date();
        var results = newdate.toDateString();
        var exp = new RegExp("[0-9]{4}\\.\[0-9]{2}\\.\[0-9]{2}");
        var newresults = results.match(exp);
        console.log(newresults);
    }

Answer 1

Instead of using toDateString , use the date methods to build up your string piece by piece:

var results = newdate.getFullYear() + '.' +
    newdate.getMonth() + '.' + newdate.getDate();

It's impossible to tell if you wanted month then day or day then month, so flip them if you need to.

Edit: you need to pad zeros on the month and day to fit the regex:

String.prototype.padZero = function () {
    if (this.length === 1) {
        return '0' + this;
    } else {
        return this;
    }
};

var year = newdate.getFullYear();
var month = newdate.getMonth().toString();
var day = newdate.getDate().toString();

var results = year + '.' + month.padZero()  + '.' + day.padZero();

http://jsfiddle.net/WVCfz/