What is the best way to initialize a JavaScript Date to midnight?

Question

What is the simplest way to obtain an instance of new Date() but set the time at midnight?

Answer 1

A one-liner for object configs:

new Date(new Date().setHours(0,0,0,0));

When creating an element:

dateFieldConfig = {
      name: "mydate",
      value: new Date(new Date().setHours(0, 0, 0, 0)),
}

Answer 2

The setHours method can take optional minutes, seconds and ms arguments, for example:

var d = new Date();
d.setHours(0,0,0,0);

That will set the time to 00:00:00.000 of your current timezone, if you want to work in UTC time, you can use the setUTCHours method.

Answer 3

I have made a couple prototypes to handle this for me.

// This is a safety check to make sure the prototype is not already defined.
Function.prototype.method = function (name, func) {
    if (!this.prototype[name]) {
        this.prototype[name] = func;
        return this;
    }
};

Date.method('endOfDay', function () {
    var date = new Date(this);
    date.setHours(23, 59, 59, 999);
    return date;
});

Date.method('startOfDay', function () {
    var date = new Date(this);
    date.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0);
    return date;
});

if you dont want the saftey check, then you can just use

Date.prototype.startOfDay = function(){
  /*Method body here*/
};

Example usage:

var date = new Date($.now()); // $.now() requires jQuery
console.log('startOfDay: ' + date.startOfDay());
console.log('endOfDay: ' + date.endOfDay());