How do I format a Microsoft JSON date?

Question

I'm taking my first crack at Ajax with jQuery. I'm getting my data onto my page, but I'm having some trouble with the JSON data that is returned for Date data types. Basically, I'm getting a string back that looks like this:

/Date(1224043200000)/

From someone totally new to JSON - How do I format this to a short date format? Should this be handled somewhere in the jQuery code? I've tried the jQuery.UI.datepicker plugin using $.datepicker.formatDate() without any success.

FYI: Here's the solution I came up with using a combination of the answers here:

function getMismatch(id) {
  $.getJSON("Main.aspx?Callback=GetMismatch",
    { MismatchId: id },

    function (result) {
      $("#AuthMerchId").text(result.AuthorizationMerchantId);
      $("#SttlMerchId").text(result.SettlementMerchantId);
      $("#CreateDate").text(formatJSONDate(Date(result.AppendDts)));
      $("#ExpireDate").text(formatJSONDate(Date(result.ExpiresDts)));
      $("#LastUpdate").text(formatJSONDate(Date(result.LastUpdateDts)));
      $("#LastUpdatedBy").text(result.LastUpdateNt);
      $("#ProcessIn").text(result.ProcessIn);
    }
  );

  return false;
}

function formatJSONDate(jsonDate) {
  var newDate = dateFormat(jsonDate, "mm/dd/yyyy");
  return newDate;
}

This solution got my object from the callback method and displayed the dates on the page properly using the date format library.

Answer 1

I also had to search for a solution to this problem and eventually I came across moment.js which is a nice library that can parse this date format and many more.

var d = moment(yourdatestring)

It saved some headache for me so I thought I'd share it with you. :)
You can find some more info about it here: http://momentjs.com/

Answer 2

Posting in awesome thread:

var d = new Date(parseInt('/Date(1224043200000)/'.slice(6, -2)));
alert('' + (1 + d.getMonth()) + '/' + d.getDate() + '/' + d.getFullYear().toString().slice(-2));

Answer 3

This is frustrating. My solution was to parse out the "/ and /" from the value generated by ASP.NET's JavaScriptSerializer so that, though JSON may not have a date literal, it still gets interpreted by the browser as a date, which is what all I really want:{"myDate":Date(123456789)}

Custom JavaScriptConverter for DateTime?

I must emphasize the accuracy of Roy Tinker's comment. This is not legal JSON. It's a dirty, dirty hack on the server to remove the issue before it becomes a problem for JavaScript. It will choke a JSON parser. I used it for getting off the ground, but I do not use this any more. However, I still feel the best answer lies with changing how the server formats the date, for example, ISO as mentioned elsewhere.

Answer 4

Add the jQuery UI plugin in your page:

function DateFormate(dateConvert) {
    return $.datepicker.formatDate("dd/MM/yyyy", eval('new ' + dateConvert.slice(1, -1)));
};

Answer 5

I ended up adding the "characters into Panos's regular expression to get rid of the ones generated by the Microsoft serializer for when writing objects into an inline script:

So if you have a property in your C# code-behind that's something like

protected string JsonObject { get { return jsSerialiser.Serialize(_myObject); }}

And in your aspx you have

<script type="text/javascript">
    var myObject = '<%= JsonObject %>';
</script>

You'd get something like

var myObject = '{"StartDate":"\/Date(1255131630400)\/"}';

Notice the double quotes.

To get this into a form that eval will correctly deserialize, I used:

myObject = myObject.replace(/"\/Date\((\d+)\)\/"/g, 'new Date($1)');

I use Prototype and to use it I added

String.prototype.evalJSONWithDates = function() {
    var jsonWithDates = this.replace(/"\/Date\((\d+)\)\/"/g, 'new Date($1)');
    return jsonWithDates.evalJSON(true);
}

Answer 6

Check up the date ISO standard; kind of like this:

yyyy.MM.ddThh:mm

It becomes 2008.11.20T22:18.