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The Temporal
object enables date and time management in various scenarios, including built-in time zone and calendar representation, wall-clock time conversions, arithmetics, formatting, and more. It is designed as a full replacement for the Date
object.
Unlike most global objects, Temporal
is not a constructor. You cannot use it with the new
operator or invoke the Temporal
object as a function. All properties and methods of Temporal
are static (just like the Math
object).
Temporal
has an intricate and powerful API. It exposes over 200 utility methods via several classes, so it could appear very complex. We will provide a high-level overview of how these APIs are related to each other.
JavaScript has had the Date
object for handling date and time since its first days. However, the Date
API is based on the poorly designed java.util.Date
class from Java, which was replaced in the early 2010s; but, because of JavaScript's goal of backward compatibility, Date
sticks around in the language.
The important lesson to preface the whole introduction is that date handling is complex. Most of the problems of Date
are fixable by adding more methods, but a fundamental design flaw remains: it exposes so many methods on the same object that developers are often confused about what to use, leading to unexpected pitfalls. A well-designed API not only needs to do more, but also should do less with each level of abstraction, because preventing misuse is as important as enabling use cases.
Date
objects wear two hats simultaneously:
Date
objects provide methods for reading and modifying these components.Time zones underlie a significant number of date-related bugs. When interacting with a Date
via the "combination of components" model, the time can only be in two time zones: UTC and local (device), and there's no way to specify an arbitrary time zone. Also lacking is the concept of "no time zone": this is known as a calendar date (for dates) or wall-clock time (for times), which is a time you "read off a calendar or clock". For example, if you are setting a daily wake up alarm, you will want to set it to "8:00AM" regardless of whether it is daylight saving time or not, whether you have traveled to a different time zone, etc.
A second feature lacking from Date
is a calendar system. Most people may be familiar with the Gregorian calendar, where there are two eras, BC and AD; there are 12 months; each month has a different number of days; there's a leap year every 4 years; and so on. However, some of these concepts may not apply when you are working with another calendar system, such as the Hebrew calendar, the Chinese calendar, the Japanese calendar, etc. With Date
, you can only work with the Gregorian calendar model.
There are many other undesirable legacies about Date
, such as all setters being mutating (which often causes unwanted side effects), the date time string format being impossible to parse in a consistent way, etc. In the end, the best solution is to build a new API from scratch, which is what Temporal
is.
Temporal
is a namespace, like Intl
. It contains several classes and namespaces, each of which is designed to handle a specific aspect of date and time management. The classes can be grouped as such:
Temporal.Duration
Temporal.Instant
Temporal.ZonedDateTime
Temporal.PlainDateTime
(Note: ZonedDateTime
is equivalent to PlainDateTime
plus a time zone)
Temporal.PlainDate
Temporal.PlainYearMonth
Temporal.PlainMonthDay
Temporal.PlainTime
Furthermore, there's also another utility namespace, Temporal.Now
, which provides methods for getting the current time in various formats.
There are many classes in the Temporal
namespace, but they share many similar methods. The following table lists all methods of each class (except conversion methods):
The following table summarizes which properties are available on each class, giving you a sense of what information each class can represent.
Conversion between classesThe table below summarizes all conversion methods that exist on each class.
With these tables, you should have a basic idea of how to navigate the Temporal
API.
A calendar is a way to organize days, typically into periods of weeks, months, years, and eras. Most of the world uses the Gregorian calendar, but there are many other calendars in use, especially in religious and cultural contexts. By default, all calendar-aware Temporal
objects use the ISO 8601 calendar system, which is based on the Gregorian calendar and defines additional week-numbering rules. Intl.supportedValuesOf()
lists most of the calendars likely to be supported by browsers. Here we provide a brief overview of how calendar systems are formed to help you internalize what factors may vary between calendars.
There are three prominent periodic events on Earth: its rotation around the sun (365.242 days for one revolution), the moon's rotation around the Earth (29.53 days from new moon to new moon), and its rotation around its axis (24 hours from sunrise to sunrise). Every culture has the same measure of a "day", which is 24 hours. Occasional changes such as daylight saving time are not part of the calendar, but are part of the time zone's information.
In Temporal
, every date under one calendar system is uniquely identified by three components: year
, month
, and day
. While year
is typically a positive integer, it may also be zero or negative, and increases monotonically with time. The year 1
(or 0
, if it exists) is known as the calendar epoch, and is arbitrary for each calendar. month
is a positive integer that increments by 1 every time, starting at 1
and ending at date.monthsInYear
, then resetting back to 1
as the year advances. day
is also a positive integer, but it may not start at 1 or increment by 1 every time, because political changes may cause days to be skipped or repeated. But in general, day
monotonically increases and resets as the month advances.
In addition to year
, a year can also be uniquely identified by the combination of era
and eraYear
, for calendars that use eras. For example, the Gregorian calendar uses the era "CE" (Common Era) and "BCE" (Before Common Era), and the year -1
is the same as { era: "bce", eraYear: 2 }
(note that year 0
always exists for all calendars; for the Gregorian calendar, it corresponds to 1 BCE due to astronomical year numbering). era
is a lowercase string, and eraYear
is an arbitrary integer that may be zero or negative, or even decrease with time (usually for the oldest era).
Note: Always use era
and eraYear
as a pair; don't use one property without also using the other. In addition, to avoid conflicts, don't combine year
and era
/eraYear
when designating a year. Pick one year representation and use it consistently.
Be careful of the following incorrect assumptions about years:
era
and eraYear
are always present; they may be undefined
.era
is a user-friendly string; use toLocaleString()
to format your date instead.year
values from different calendars are comparable; use the compare()
static method instead.daysInYear
and monthsInYear
instead.inLeapYear
is true
) have one extra day; they may have an extra month.In addition to month
, a month in a year can also be uniquely identified by the monthCode
. monthCode
usually maps to the month's name, but month
does not. For example, in the case of lunisolar calendars, two months with the same monthCode
, where one belongs to a leap year and the other one does not, will have different month
values if they come after the leap month, due to the insertion of an extra month.
Note: To avoid conflicts, don't combine month
and monthCode
when designating a month. Pick one month representation and use it consistently. month
is more useful if you need the order of months in a year (e.g., when looping through the months), while monthCode
is more useful if you need the name of the month (e.g., when storing birthdays).
Be careful of the following incorrect assumptions about months:
monthCode
and month
always correspond.daysInMonth
instead.monthCode
is a user-friendly string; use toLocaleString()
to format your date instead.monthCode
usually maps to the month's name within one calendar, we recommend always computing the month's name using, for example, date.toLocaleString("en-US", { calendar: date.calendarId, month: "long" })
.In addition to day
(which is a month-based index), a day in a year can also be uniquely identified by the dayOfYear
. dayOfYear
is a positive integer that increments by 1 every time, starting at 1
and ending at date.daysInYear
.
The concept of a "week" is not connected with any astronomical event, but is a cultural construct. While the most common length is 7
days, weeks can also have 4, 5, 6, 8, or more days â or even lack a fixed number of days altogether. To get the specific number of days of the week of a date, use the date's daysInWeek
. Temporal
identifies weeks by the combination of weekOfYear
and yearOfWeek
. weekOfYear
is a positive integer that increments by 1 every time, starting at 1
, then resetting back to 1
as the year advances. yearOfWeek
is generally the same as year
, but may be different at the start or end of each year, because one week may cross two years, and yearOfWeek
picks one of the two years based on the calendar's rules.
Note: Always use weekOfYear
and yearOfWeek
as a pair; don't use weekOfYear
and year
.
Be careful of the following incorrect assumptions about weeks:
weekOfYear
and yearOfWeek
are always present; they may be undefined
.daysInWeek
instead.Temporal
API does not support year-week dates, so you can't construct dates using these properties or serialize dates to year-week representations. They are only informational properties.All Temporal
classes can be serialized and deserialized using the format specified in RFC 9557, which is based on ISO 8601 / RFC 3339. The format, in its full form, is as follows (spaces are only for readability and should not be present in the actual string):
YYYY-MM-DD T HH:mm:ss.sssssssss Z/±HH:mm [time_zone_id] [u-ca=calendar_id]
Different classes have different requirements for the presence of each component, so you will find a section titled "RFC 9557 format" in each class's documentation, which specifies the format recognized by that class.
This is very similar to the date time string format used by Date
, which is also based on ISO 8601. The main addition is the ability to specify micro- and nanosecond components, and the ability to specify the time zone and calendar system.
All Temporal
objects that represent a specific calendar date impose a similar limit on the range of representable dates, which is ±108 days (inclusive) from the Unix epoch, or the range of instants from -271821-04-20T00:00:00
to +275760-09-13T00:00:00
. This is the same range as valid dates. More specifically:
Temporal.Instant
and Temporal.ZonedDateTime
apply this limit directly on its epochNanoseconds
value.Temporal.PlainDateTime
interprets the date-time in the UTC time zone and requires it to be ±(108 + 1) days (exclusive) from the Unix epoch, so its valid range is -271821-04-19T00:00:00
to +275760-09-14T00:00:00
, exclusive. This allows any ZonedDateTime
to be converted to a PlainDateTime
regardless of its offset.Temporal.PlainDate
applies the same check as PlainDateTime
to the noon (12:00:00
) of that date, so its valid range is -271821-04-19
to +275760-09-13
. This allows any PlainDateTime
to be converted to a PlainDate
regardless of its time, and vice versa.Temporal.PlainYearMonth
has the valid range of -271821-04
to +275760-09
. This allows any PlainDate
to be converted to a PlainYearMonth
regardless of its date (except if a non-ISO month's first day falls in the ISO month -271821-03
).The Temporal
objects will refuse to construct an instance representing a date/time beyond this limit. This includes:
from()
static method.with()
method to update calendar fields.add()
, subtract()
, round()
, or any other method to derive new instances.Temporal.Duration
Experimental
Represents a difference between two time points, which can be used in date/time arithmetic. It is fundamentally represented as a combination of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, and nanoseconds values.
Temporal.Instant
Experimental
Represents a unique point in time, with nanosecond precision. It is fundamentally represented as the number of nanoseconds since the Unix epoch (midnight at the beginning of January 1, 1970, UTC), without any time zone or calendar system.
Temporal.Now
Experimental
Provides methods for getting the current time in various formats.
Temporal.PlainDate
Experimental
Represents a calendar date (a date without a time or time zone); for example, an event on a calendar which happens during the whole day no matter which time zone it's happening in. It is fundamentally represented as an ISO 8601 calendar date, with year, month, and day fields, and an associated calendar system.
Temporal.PlainDateTime
Experimental
Represents a date (calendar date) and time (wall-clock time) without a time zone. It is fundamentally represented as a combination of a date (with an associated calendar system) and a time.
Temporal.PlainMonthDay
Experimental
Represents the month and day of a calendar date, without a year or time zone; for example, an event on a calendar that recurs every year and happens during the whole day. It is fundamentally represented as an ISO 8601 calendar date, with year, month, and day fields, and an associated calendar system. The year is used to disambiguate the month-day in non-ISO calendar systems.
Temporal.PlainTime
Experimental
Represents a time without a date or time zone; for example, a recurring event that happens at the same time every day. It is fundamentally represented as a combination of hour, minute, second, millisecond, microsecond, and nanosecond values.
Temporal.PlainYearMonth
Experimental
Represents the year and month of a calendar date, without a day or time zone; for example, an event on a calendar that happens during the whole month. It is fundamentally represented as an ISO 8601 calendar date, with year, month, and day fields, and an associated calendar system. The day is used to disambiguate the year-month in non-ISO calendar systems.
Temporal.ZonedDateTime
Experimental
Represents a date and time with a time zone. It is fundamentally represented as a combination of an instant, a time zone, and a calendar system.
Temporal[Symbol.toStringTag]
The initial value of the [Symbol.toStringTag]
property is the string "Temporal"
. This property is used in Object.prototype.toString()
.
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