why getMonth() starts with 0

Question

I was coding a function to remove a day from a date value in javascript and i was kind of surprise that javascript's getMonth() starts from 0 for January to 11 for December. Why javascript's getMonth() starts with 0?

OK so let me ask a more generally question. Why would you write a date object that has 0 index based months but not days,years,hours, minutes etc? — The Muffin Man, Oct 03 '12 at 18:58

score 14 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 12 '17 at 07:31

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at a guess, to help with indexing into arrays.

Imagine you have your month display strings stored in an array and want to get the correct string using getMonth()

of course, why arrays start at zero is another question

edited Apr 12 '17 at 07:31

Community

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answered Sep 15 '11 at 11:28

jk.

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No no no!!! It has to do with [this question](http://xkcd.com/163/) – cwallenpoole Sep 15 '11 at 13:01

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 15 '11 at 13:14

Most likely because the C library call invoked to get the value to return, returns months this way.

(And the reason for that design was most likely because the library call was designed along with the program to actually print the date, where a zero-based index could be used directly to print the month names)

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 11 '12 at 12:58

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If one element in a struct starts with 0 then all elements should start with it too or none of them. I discovered that behaviour on my site a bit late.

edited Oct 11 '12 at 12:58

Walter

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answered Oct 11 '12 at 05:12

Tarik

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why getMonth() starts with 0

3 Answers3