Get the current year from Date in JavaScript tutorial

When you need to get the current year value from a JavaScript Date object, you need to use the Date.getFullYear() method, which returns a number value representing the year of the date.

For example, the following Date object will return 2021 when you call the getFullYear() method:

const date = new Date("01/20/2021"); // 20th January 2021
const year = date.getFullYear();

console.log(year); // 2021

If you want to get the year represented by 2 digits, you can transform the returned year value into a string and use the substring() method to extract the last 2 digits. Here’s an example:

const date = new Date("01/20/2021"); // 20th January 2021
const year = date.getFullYear(); // 2021

const year2digits = year.toString().substring(2);

console.log(year2digits); // "21"

You can cast the 2 digits string representing the year back into number value using the Number() method if you need to.

Finally, you can use JavaScript to automatically update an HTML <footer> to always show the current year. In the following example, the <script> tag will put the year value inside the <span> tag:

<footer>
  &copy; <span id="year"></span>
</footer>
<script>
  const date = new Date();
  const year = date.getFullYear(); // 2021

  document.getElementById("year").innerHTML = year;
</script>

And that’s how you can get the current year value using JavaScript.