Web App Development

Adventures in filling out a date input with Puppeteer

As part of an end-to-end test I recently need to fill out an input type="date" field in Chrome using Puppeteer.

Fundamentally it’s straightforward, just type in the numbers like you would as a user. The slashes are handled by the browser:

await page.type("input", "01042020") // 1st of April 2020

This would work fine on my laptop with a UK locale, but it would break on the CI server in the US, which needs a date beginning with the month: 04 01 2020.

To get the localized format we can use toLocaleDateString:

await page.type("input", date.toLocaleDateString().replace(/\//g, ""))

Except that Node doesn’t ship with with different locales and toLocaleDateString will always use the US format.

Good thing we’re already using Puppeteer and have a Chrome instance running! We can use page.evaluate to get the localized date string from inside the browser:

let dateString = await page.evaluate(
    d => new Date(d).toLocaleDateString(),
    // pass date value from Node to Chrome as the `d` parameter
    date.toISOString()
);
await page.type("input", dateString)")

We’ve now got a localized date string – in the US it’s going to look like this: 4/1/2020.

But when you type 4 1 2020 into the date field the browser doesn’t know if there are one or two digits for the month. So if we enter this string in the US the final date will be 4/12/0020. Not quite what we wanted!

Luckily, toLocaleString allows us to customize the date format and make sure leading zeros are added.

let dateString = await page.evaluate(
    d => new Date(d).toLocaleDateString(navigator.language, {
        day: "2-digit",
        month: "2-digit",
        year: "numeric",
    }),
    date.toISOString()
);
await page.type("input", dateString)")

And this finally worked both on my computer and an the CI server!

Satisfied seal when their build finally passes again


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