fecha
A lightweight JavaScript library for date formatting and parsing, designed as a minimal alternative to moment.js.
What is fecha?
Fecha is a lightweight JavaScript library that provides date formatting and parsing functionality. It allows developers to convert Date objects to formatted strings and parse date strings into Date objects using customizable tokens and masks. It solves the problem of needing simple date manipulation without the large bundle size of comprehensive date libraries.
JavaScript developers who need efficient date formatting and parsing in web or Node.js applications, particularly those concerned about bundle size and performance.
Developers choose Fecha for its minimal footprint (~2KB), focused feature set, and straightforward API. It offers a direct replacement for moment.js's formatting and parsing capabilities while being significantly smaller and faster.
Overview
Lightweight and simple JS date formatting and parsing
Use Cases
Best For
- Formatting dates for display in web applications with custom formats
- Parsing user-input date strings in forms or data imports
- Reducing bundle size in performance-critical frontend projects
- Adding internationalization support for date displays
- Replacing moment.js in projects that only need formatting/parsing
- Creating consistent date formats across an application with custom masks
Not Ideal For
- Applications requiring date arithmetic like adding days or calculating intervals
- Projects that need to parse arbitrary date strings without prior format knowledge
- Teams looking for out-of-the-box internationalization with pre-configured locales for many languages
- Systems where robust, silent error handling for invalid dates is preferred over throwing errors
Pros & Cons
Pros
At ~2KB minified and gzipped, Fecha adds minimal overhead, making it ideal for performance-critical web apps, as highlighted in the README's comparison with Moment.js.
Supports a wide range of tokens for custom formatting, including months, days, years, and fractional seconds, detailed in the formatting tokens table.
Allows full customization of day/month names, AM/PM labels, and ordinal suffixes via setGlobalDateI18n, enabling easy localization without bloat.
Enables defining reusable format patterns with setGlobalDateMasks, promoting consistency across applications, as shown in the examples for masks like 'myMask'.
Cons
Fecha explicitly excludes date arithmetic features like adding days or comparisons, requiring separate libraries for such operations, as admitted in the vs. Moment table.
The parse function must be given a format string; it cannot automatically detect date formats, limiting flexibility with unpredictable user input.
Both format and parse throw errors on invalid parameters, which can crash applications if not caught, unlike libraries that return null or defaults.
Internationalization requires manual configuration of all locale strings; there are no pre-built locale files, increasing setup time for multi-language apps.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
Day.js⏰ Day.js 2kB immutable date-time library alternative to Moment.js with the same modern API
Moment.jsParse, validate, manipulate, and display dates in javascript.
date-fns⏳ Modern JavaScript date utility library ⌛️
Luxon⏱ A library for working with dates and times in JS
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