One Month – The Daily WTF

Joseph sends us a tried and true classic: bad date handling code, in JavaScript. We’ve all seen so much bad date handling code that it takes something special to make me do the “confused dog” head tilt.

		var months=new Array(13);
		months[1]='January';
		months[2]='February';
		months[3]='March';
		months[4]='April';
		months[5]='May';
		months[6]='June';
		months[7]='July';
		months[8]='August';
		months[9]='September';
		months[10]='October';
		months[11]='November';
		months[12]='December';
		var time=new Date();
		var lmonth=months[time.getMonth() + 1];
		var date=time.getDate();
		var year=time.getFullYear();
		document.write(lmonth + ' ');
		document.write(date + ', ' + year);

We create a 13 element array to hold our twelve months, because we can’t handle it being zero indexed. This array is going to be our lookup table for month names, so I almost forgive making it one-indexed- January is month 1, normally.

Almost. Because not only is that stupid, the getMonth() function on a date returns the month as a zero-indexed number. January is month 0. So they need to add one to the result of getMonth for their lookup table to work, and it’s just so dumb.

Then of course, be output this all using document.write, so we just know it’s terrible JavaScript, all the way around.