The resulting value includes the year, month, and day, but not the time. The
time and datetime-local input types support time and date+time input. The input
UI generally varies from browser to browser; see Browser compatibility for further details. In unsupported browsers, the control degrades gracefully to A string representing the date entered in the input. The date is formatted according to ISO8601, described in Date strings format. You can set a default value for the input with a date inside the
elements of
type="date"
create input fields that let the user enter a date, either with a textbox that validates the input or a special date picker interface.Try it
.
Value
value
attribute, like so:
Note: The displayed date format will differ from the actual value
— the displayed date is formatted based on the locale of the user's browser, but the parsed value
is always formatted yyyy-mm-dd
.
You can get and set the date value in JavaScript with the
HTMLInputElement
value
and valueAsNumber
properties. For example:
const dateControl = document.querySelector['input[type="date"]'];
dateControl.value = '2017-06-01';
console.log[dateControl.value]; // prints "2017-06-01"
console.log[dateControl.valueAsNumber]; // prints 1496275200000, a JavaScript timestamp [ms]
This code finds the first element whose
type
is date
, and sets its value to 2017-06-01
[June 1st, 2017]. It then reads that value back in string and number formats.
Additional attributes
The attributes common to all elements apply to the
date
inputs as well, but might not influence its presentation. For example
size
and placeholder
might not work. date
inputs have the following additional attributes.
max
The latest date to accept. If the value
entered into the element occurs afterward, the
element fails constraint validation. If the value of the max
attribute isn't a possible date string in the format yyyy-mm-dd
, then the element has no maximum date value.
If both the max
and min
attributes are set, this value must be a date string later than or equal to the one in the min
attribute.
min
The earliest date to accept. If the value
entered into the element occurs beforehand, the element fails constraint validation.
If the value of the min
attribute isn't a possible date string in the format yyyy-mm-dd
, then the element has no minimum date value.
If both the max
and min
attributes are set, this value must be a date string earlier than or equal to the one in the max
attribute.
step
The step
attribute is a number that specifies the granularity that the value must adhere to, or the special value any
, which is described below. Only values which are equal to the basis for stepping [min
if specified,
value
otherwise, and an appropriate default value if neither of those is provided] are valid.
A string value of any
means that no stepping is implied, and any value is allowed [barring other constraints, such as min
and
max
].
Note: When the data entered by the user doesn't adhere to the stepping configuration, the user agent may round to the nearest valid value, preferring numbers in the positive direction when there are two equally close options.
For date
inputs, the value of
step
is given in days; and is treated as a number of milliseconds equal to 86,400,000 times the step
value [the underlying numeric value is in milliseconds]. The default value of step
is 1, indicating 1 day.
Note: Specifying any
as the value for step
has the same effect as 1
for date
inputs.
Using date inputs
Date inputs provide an easy interface for choosing dates, and they normalize the data format sent to the server regardless of the user's locale.
In this section, we'll look at basic and then more complex uses of .
Basic uses of date
The simplest use of involves one
combined with its
, as seen below:
Enter your birthday:
Submit
This HTML submits the entered date under the key bday
to //example.com
—
resulting in a URL like //example.com/?bday=1955-06-08
.
Setting maximum and minimum dates
You can use the
min
and max
attributes to restrict the dates that can be chosen by the user. In the following example, we set a minimum date of 2017-04-01
and a maximum date of 2017-04-30
:
Choose your preferred party date:
The result is that only days in April 2017 can be selected — the month and year parts of the textbox will be uneditable, and dates outside April 2017 can't be selected in the picker widget.
Note: You should be able to use the step
attribute to vary the number of days jumped each time the date is incremented [e.g. to only make Saturdays selectable]. However, this does not seem to be in any implementation at the time of writing.
Controlling input size
doesn't support form sizing attributes such as
size
. Prefer
CSS for sizing it.
Validation
By default, doesn't validate the entered value beyond its format. The interfaces generally don't let you enter anything that isn't a date — which is helpful
— but you can leave the field empty or enter an invalid date in browsers where the input falls back to type
text
[like the 32nd of April].
If you use min
and max
to restrict the available dates [see
Setting maximum and minimum dates], supporting browsers will display an error if you try to submit a date that is out of bounds. However, you'll need to double-check the submitted results to ensure the value is within these dates, if the date picker isn't fully supported on the user's device.
You can also use the
required
attribute to make filling in the date mandatory — an error will be displayed if you try to submit an empty date field. This should work in most browsers, even if they fall back to a text input.
Let's look at an example of minimum and maximum dates, and also made a field required:
Choose your preferred party date [required, April 1st to 20th]:
Submit
If you try to submit the form with an incomplete date [or with a date outside the set bounds], the browser displays an error. Try playing with the example now:
Here's the CSS used in the above example. We make use of the :valid
and :invalid
pseudo-elements to add an icon next to the input,
based on whether or not the current value is valid. We had to put the icon on a next to the input, not on the input itself, because in Chrome at least the input's generated content is placed inside the form control, and can't be styled or shown effectively.
label {
display: flex;
align-items: center;
}
span::after {
padding-left: 5px;
}
input:invalid + span::after {
content: "✖";
}
input:valid + span::after {
content: "✓";
}
Warning: Client-side form validation is no substitute for validating on the server. It's easy for someone to modify the HTML, or bypass your HTML entirely and submit the data directly to your server. If your server fails to validate the received data, disaster could strike with data that is badly-formatted, too large, of the wrong type, etc.
Handling browser support
Browsers that don't support this input type gracefully degrade to a text input, but this creates problems in consistency of user interface [the presented controls are different] and data handling.
The second problem is the more serious one; with date input supported, the value is normalized to the format yyyy-mm-dd
. But with a text input, the browser has no recognition of what format the date should be in, and there are many
different formats in which people write dates. For example:
ddmmyyyy
dd/mm/yyyy
mm/dd/yyyy
dd-mm-yyyy
mm-dd-yyyy
Month dd, yyyy
One way around this is the pattern
attribute on your date input. Even though the date picker doesn't use it, the text input fallback will. For example, try viewing the following in a unsupporting browser:
Enter your birthday:
Submit
If you submit it, you'll see that the browser displays an error and highlights the input as invalid if your entry doesn't match the pattern ####-##-##
[where #
is a digit from 0 to 9]. Of course, this doesn't stop people from entering invalid dates, or incorrect formats. So we still have a problem.
span {
position: relative;
}
span::after {
right: -18px;
position: absolute;
}
input:invalid + span::after {
content: "✖";
}
input:valid + span::after {
content: "✓";
}
At the moment, the best way to deal with dates in forms in a cross-browser way is to have the user enter the day, month, and year in separate controls, or to use a JavaScript library such as jQuery date picker.
Examples
In this example, we create 2 sets of UI elements for choosing dates: a native picker and a set of 3
elements for older browsers that don't support the native date input.
HTML
The HTML looks like so:
Enter your birthday:
Enter your birthday:
Day:
Month:
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Year:
The months are hardcoded [as they are always the same], while the day and year values are dynamically generated depending on the currently selected month and year, and the current year [see the code comments below for detailed explanations of how these functions work.]
span {
padding-left: 5px;
}
input:invalid + span::after {
content: "✖";
}
input:valid + span::after {
content: "✓";
}
JavaScript
The other part of the code that may
be of interest is the feature detection code — to detect whether the browser supports .
We create a new element, try setting its
type
to date
, then immediately check what its type is — unsupporting browsers will return text
, because the date
type falls back to type text
. If isn't supported, we hide the native picker and show the fallback
[
] instead.
// Obtain UI widgets
const nativePicker = document.querySelector['.nativeDatePicker'];
const fallbackPicker = document.querySelector['.fallbackDatePicker'];
const fallbackLabel = document.querySelector['.fallbackLabel'];
const yearSelect = document.querySelector['#year'];
const monthSelect = document.querySelector['#month'];
const daySelect = document.querySelector['#day'];
// hide fallback initially
fallbackPicker.style.display = 'none';
fallbackLabel.style.display = 'none';
// test whether a new date input falls back to a text input or not
const test = document.createElement['input'];
try {
test.type = 'date';
} catch [e] {
console.log[e.message];
}
// if it does, run the code inside the if [] {} block
if [test.type === 'text'] {
// hide the native picker and show the fallback
nativePicker.style.display = 'none';
fallbackPicker.style.display = 'block';
fallbackLabel.style.display = 'block';
// populate the days and years dynamically
// [the months are always the same, therefore hardcoded]
populateDays[monthSelect.value];
populateYears[];
}
function populateDays[month] {
// delete the current set of elements out of the
// day , ready for the next set to be injected
while [daySelect.firstChild] {
daySelect.removeChild[daySelect.firstChild];
}
// Create variable to hold new number of days to inject
let dayNum;
// 31 or 30 days?
if [['January', 'March', 'May', 'July', 'August', 'October', 'December'].includes[month]] {
dayNum = 31;
} else if [['April', 'June', 'September', 'November'].includes[month]] {
dayNum = 30;
} else {
// If month is February, calculate whether it is a leap year or not
const year = yearSelect.value;
const isLeap = new Date[year, 1, 29].getMonth[] === 1;
dayNum = isLeap ? 29 : 28;
}
// inject the right number of new elements into the day
for [let i = 1; i