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

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.

From stackoverflow

•     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..

  Marcus : This works pretty well except for two things: 1) I was kind of hoping to use jQuery method to get the current date, but maybe it doesn't matter. 2) this solution produces a value exactly one month previous to today's date!

  lucas : OH - you're right! check it out - http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_obj_date.asp - month is 0-11 - you'll have to add 1.. curiously, getDate is 1-31, but getMonth is 0-11..

• 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!

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

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

  CiscoIPPhone : My browser did not recognise the asString() function. I did it like this: $(".date-pick").datepicker('setDate', new Date());

  gaoshan88 : I think asString() should be toString().

  gamerzfuse : Kevin Luck's DatePicker and the Jquery UI DatePicker are two very different datepickers.

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

  anytips?

  pauliephonic : Not really an answer there. You just kinda copied the code from a previous answer as a question.

• 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

• This is concise and does the job:

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

  Dan Diplo : This is a MUCH nicer solution than the accepted solution!

• 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!) ;)

• replace .asString() with .toString()