Javascript Date – set just the date, ignoring time?

I have a bunch of objects, each of which has a timestamp, that I want to group by date, into a JSON object. The ultimate goal is something like this:

myObject = {
    "06/07/2012" : [ 
        {
            "timestamp" : "07/06/2012 13:30",
            ...
        },
        {
            "timestamp" : "07/06/2012 14:00",
            ...
        }
    ],
    "07/07/2012 [...]
}

To get the date, I’m testing each timestamp object and using:

var visitDate = new Date(parseInt(item.timestamp, 10));
visitDate.setHours(0);
visitDate.setMinutes(0);
visitDate.setSeconds(0);

..then I’m using that to store as a name for the JSON object. It seems messy, and I’m sure there should be an easier way of doing things.

Advice / suggestions welcomed!!

Answer

How about .toDateString()?

Alternatively, use .getDate(), .getMonth(), and .getYear()?

In my mind, if you want to group things by date, you simply want to access the date, not set it. Through having some set way of accessing the date field, you can compare them and group them together, no?

Check out all the fun Date methods here: MDN Docs

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Edit: If you want to keep it as a date object, just do this:

var newDate = new Date(oldDate.toDateString());

Date’s constructor is pretty smart about parsing Strings (though not without a ton of caveats, but this should work pretty consistently), so taking the old Date and printing it to just the date without any time will result in the same effect you had in the original post.