Can a JSON object returned by PHP contain a date object

Question

Is there a way to create a JSON object in PHP that contains a javascript date object? Does json_encode automatically convert PHP's DateTime to Javascript's date?

Answer 1

The JavaScript Date object is not valid JSON and is only seen in the wild because a lot of people parse their JSON with a full-blown eval().

An easy, human-readable alternative would be to send the date as a string in a format supported by Date.parse().

Your JSON:

{
    date: '<?php echo date("r", $myDate); ?>'
}

Your JavaScript:

var myDateObj = new Date(Date.parse(myJSON.date));

Source: http://json.org/ - See the box on the right for a list of valid JSON data types.