JavaScript Date object and Arrays

Short post. Putting this here for myself and future googlers.

Did you know that you can easily create an array of all the days in a year? You don’t have to explicitly set the month parameter in new Date().

first we’ll make a range function, unless you’re using the underscore/loash method _.range

function range(num) {
    return Array.apply(null, Array(num)).map(function (_, i) {return i;});
}

which will give us an array of numbers from 0-364. All we have to do to transform that into an array of Date objects is map them. The day parameter will automagically do a modulo into the month parameter:

var dateArr = range(365).map(function (i) {
    // must add 1 to the date
    // January 1, 2014 would be new Date(2014, 0, 1)
    return new Date(2014, 0, i + 1);
});

Presto! You don’t ever have to remember the number of days in each month again!

I’ll leave it to you to figure out if it’s a leap year or not.