Sunday, February 12, 2012

Why does JSON.stringify screw up my datetime object?



{ id: 1533,
story_type_id: 1,
content_id: 470,
created_at: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:02:43 GMT,
updated_at: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:02:43 GMT,
type_name: 'post' }



I have a JSON object with the "datetime" field like above. It's perfect. But when I stringify it (I want to store it in cache), I get this format:




"created_at":"2012-02-05T07:02:43.000Z"



This causes problems, because when I want to JSON.parse this, suddenly it's no longer datetime format and it's incompatible with my other format.



What can I do to solve this problem? I have 'created_at' littered everywhere throughout my application. I don't want to manually change each one.

1 comment:

  1. There is not special way to serialize Date objects in JSON. That's why you get the standardized string representation. You need to convert them back to Date objects by passing them to the Date constructor.

    item['created_at'] = new Date(item['created_at']);


    Update: With the reviver function (see comments), you can get the Date objects back.

    var item = JSON.parse(row, function (key, value) {
    if (key === 'created_at') {
    return new Date(value);
    } else {
    return value;
    }
    });

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