Using jQuery: Get Current Year

by Posted in Code
 

Using jQuery to output the current year is a useful substitute when your website pages are done in HTML and not with server side languages like PHP or ASP. The following code demonstrates how to print the current year in HTML using jQuery.

First, you will need to reference a jQuery library in the <head> of your HTML. You can do this one of two ways:

  • Link directly to the jQuery library on the jQuery code site
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  • Download a version of jQuery from the jQuery site (http://jquery.com/) and relatively link to it from within your site
<script src="/script/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

With the jQuery library referenced you can now pull the current year and push it to an HTML element using some jQuery syntax. The below JavaScript grabs the current year and pushes the value to the “text” of the HTML element with the ID of “year”.

<script type="text/javascript">
  var currentYear = (new Date).getFullYear();
  $(document).ready(function() {
  $("#year").text( (new Date).getFullYear() );
  });
</script>

Now we create the HTML element to receive the year value:

<p>Copyright <span id="year">TEXT</span> Company Name - All Rights Reserved.</p>

With this code in place, the year will be pushed to the TEXT position of the “year” span tag when the DOM is ready. This functionality is useful for elements such as copyright dates or other date representations that need to stay current.

Want to learn more about jquery? Try this resource...

jQuery: Novice to Ninja