How do I pre-populate a jQuery Datepicker textbox with today's date?

Question

I have a very simply jQuery Datepicker calendar:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#date_pretty").datepicker({ 
    });
});

and of course in the HTML...

<input type="text" size="10" value="" id="date_pretty"/>

Today's date is nicely highlighted for the user when they bring up the calendar, but how do I get jQuery to pre-populate the textbox itself with today's date on page load, without the user doing anything? 99% of the time, the today's date default will be what they want.

Answer 1

    var myDate = new Date();
    var prettyDate =(myDate.getMonth()+1) + '/' + myDate.getDate() + '/' + 
myDate.getFullYear();
    $("#date_pretty").val(prettyDate);

seemed to work, but there might be a better way out there..

Answer 2

The solution is:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#date_pretty").datepicker({ 
    });
    var myDate = new Date();
    var month = myDate.getMonth() + 1;
    var prettyDate = month + '/' + myDate.getDate() + '/' + myDate.getFullYear();
    $("#date_pretty").val(prettyDate);

});

Thanks grayghost!

Answer 3

$(function()
{
$('.date-pick').datePicker().val(new Date().asString()).trigger('change');
});

Source: http://www.kelvinluck.com/assets/jquery/datePicker/v2/demo/datePickerDefaultToday.html

Answer 4

hi all I am using popup datepicker and have following code but it wont work $('#popupDatepicker').datepick().val(new Date().asString()).trigger('change');

anytips?

Answer 5

i have a form with default values from a mysql database. after the page loads datepicker sets the current date for all my date fields :(( how can this be avoided? thanks in advance

Answer 6

This is concise and does the job:

$(".date-pick").datepicker('setDate', new Date());

Answer 7

This code will assure to use your datepicker's format:

$('#date-selector').datepicker('setDate', new Date());

No need to re-apply format, it uses the datepicker predefined-one by you on datepicker initialization (if you have assigned it!) ;)

Answer 8

replace .asString() with .toString()