Format date and Subtract days using Moment.js

You have multiple oddities happening. The first has been edited in your post, but it had to do with the order that the methods were being called.

.format returns a string. String does not have a subtract method.

The second issue is that you are subtracting the day, but not actually saving that as a variable.

Your code, then, should look like:

var startdate = moment();
startdate = startdate.subtract(1, "days");
startdate = startdate.format("DD-MM-YYYY");

However, you can chain this together; this would look like:

var startdate = moment().subtract(1, "days").format("DD-MM-YYYY");

The difference is that we're setting startdate to the changes that you're doing on startdate, because moment is destructive.

startdate = moment().subtract(1, 'days').format('DD-MM-YYYY');

var date = new Date();

var targetDate = moment(date).subtract(1, 'day').toDate(); // date object

Now, you can format how you wanna see this date or you can compare this date with another etc.

toDate() function is the point.

Try this:

var duration = moment.duration({'days' : 1});
moment().subtract(duration).format('DD-MM-YYYY');

This will give you 14-04-2015 - today is 15-04-2015

Alternatively if your momentjs version is less than 2.8.0, you can use:

startdate = moment().subtract('days', 1).format('DD-MM-YYYY');

Instead of this:

startdate = moment().subtract(1, 'days').format('DD-MM-YYYY');

I think you have got it in that last attempt, you just need to grab the string.. in Chrome's console..

startdate = moment();
startdate.subtract(1, 'd');
startdate.format('DD-MM-YYYY');
"14-04-2015"

startdate = moment();
startdate.subtract(1, 'd');
myString = startdate.format('DD-MM-YYYY');
"14-04-2015"
myString
"14-04-2015"