Format1.0.0+

moment().format();
moment().format(String);

This is the most robust display option. It takes a string of tokens and replaces them with their corresponding values.

moment().format();                                // "2014-09-08T08:02:17-05:00" (ISO 8601, no fractional seconds)
moment().format("dddd, MMMM Do YYYY, h:mm:ss a"); // "Sunday, February 14th 2010, 3:25:50 pm"
moment().format("ddd, hA");                       // "Sun, 3PM"
moment('gibberish').format('YYYY MM DD');         // "Invalid date"

X was added in 2.0.0.

e E gg gggg GG GGGG were added in 2.1.0.

x was added in 2.8.4.

SSSS to SSSSSSSSS were added in 2.10.5. They display 3 significantdigits and the rest is filled with zeros.

k and kk were added in 2.13.0.

Localized formats

Because preferred formatting differs based on locale, there are a few tokens that can be used to format a moment based on its locale.

There are upper and lower case variations on the same formats. The lowercase version is intended to be the shortened version of its uppercase counterpart.

l ll lll llll are available in 2.0.0.LTS was added in 2.8.4.

Escaping characters

To escape characters in format strings, you can wrap the characters in square brackets.

moment().format('[today] dddd'); // 'today Sunday'

Similarities and differences with LDML

Note: While these date formats are very similar to LDML date formats, there are a few minor differences regarding day of month, day of year, and day of week.

For a breakdown of a few different date formatting tokens across different locales, see this chart of date formatting tokens.

Formatting speed

To compare Moment.js formatting speed against other libraries, check out this comparison against other libraries.

Other tokens

If you are more comfortable working with strftime instead of LDML-like parsing tokens, you can use Ben Oakes' plugin. benjaminoakes/moment-strftime.

Default format

Calling moment#format without a format will default to moment.defaultFormat. Out of the box, moment.defaultFormat is the ISO8601 format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ.

As of version 2.13.0, when in UTC mode, the default format is governed by moment.defaultFormatUtc which is in the format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss[Z]. This returns Z as the offset, instead of +00:00.

In certain instances, a local timezone (such as Atlantic/Reykjavik) may have a zero offset, and will be considered to be UTC. In such cases, it may be useful to set moment.defaultFormat and moment.defaultFormatUtc to use the same formatting.

Changing the value of moment.defaultFormat will only affect formatting, and will not affect parsing. for example:

moment.defaultFormat = "DD.MM.YYYY HH:mm";
// parse with .toDate()
moment('20.07.2018 09:19').toDate() // Invalid date
// format the date string with the new defaultFormat then parse
moment('20.07.2018 09:19', moment.defaultFormat).toDate() // Fri Jul 20 2018 09:19:00 GMT+0300