Question: I'm looking for a way to convert a Javascript Date object to a string. I'm converting my site from Ruby to server side Javascript, and I'm looking for something analogous to `strftime` in Ruby, C, and many other languages.

I found plenty of simple scripts that do this kind of conversion, but I'd prefer not to include a custom implementation if there is a standard way of doing this.

I'm not using a Javascript framework. I'm using Mozilla Rhino, but would prefer to stay away from using the Java library as much as possible, to allow moving my code easily between implementations.

I want to be able to specify the format of the string, since I want to embed it in a sentence. I want to be able to insert arbitrary on's and at's, and have the full name of the day, not just it's abbreviation. So toString() won't suffice.

Answer: 
Dates have a built-in toString:

```
alert(new Date().toString())

```

"Sat Dec 19 2009 08:23:33 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)"
You could use my JavaScript implementation of Java's [SimpleDateFormat](http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html): <http://www.timdown.co.uk/code/simpledateformat.php>. It's a little lighter than date.js and is kept up to date as it is included in [log4javascript](http://log4javascript.org).