JavaScript 2.0-The Complete Reference, Second ... - freecodingtutorial

Converting this last example to a more usable value isn‘t difficult and is discussed next.
Manipulating Dates
To hide the fact that Date objects store values as millisecond offsets from the epoch, dates are
manipulated through the methods they provide. That is, Date values are set and retrieved by
invoking a method rather than setting or reading a property directly. These methods handle the
conversion of millisecond offsets to human-friendly formats and back again for you
automatically. The following example illustrates a few of the common Date methods:
var myDate = new Date();var year = myDate.getYear();year = year + 1;myDate.setYear(year);
alert(myDate);
This example gets the current date and adds one year to it. The result is shown here:
JavaScript provides a comprehensive set of get and set methods to read and write each field of
a date, including getDate(), setDate(), getMonth(), setMonth(), getHours(), setHours(),
getMinutes(), setMinutes(), getTime(), setTime, and so on. In addition, UTC versions of all
these methods are also included: getUTCMonth(), getUTCHours(), setUTCMonth(),
setUTCHours(), and so forth. One set of methods requires a special comment: getDay() and
setDay(). These are used to manipulate the day of the week that is stored as an integer from 0
(Sunday) to 6 (Saturday). An example that illustrates many of the common Date methods in
practice is shown here (the results are shown in Figure 7-1):
Figure 7-1: Common Date functions in action
var today = new Date();