javascript/json date literal

Question

What's the date literal for JSON/JavaScript ( if such thing does exists? )

Answer 1

Date literals were proposed and then retracted, maybe we'll see them in a future edition of the ECMA-262 specification.

Since there is no Date literal in JavaScript, there is no literal for JSON either (JavaScript Object Notation wouldn't be too good a name if it couldn't be parsed by a JavaScript engine ;-)). Admittedly, this is unfortunate. Many web services will output an ISO 8601 string, e.g. 2010-03-23T23:57Z, but in order to parse it in JavaScript you would need to use a custom library, create a custom function or rely on ECMAScript 5th's Date parsing specification, which states that implementations should parse ISO 8601 strings natively.

If it's your own JSON that's going to be parsed in JavaScript, you could use something simple like milliseconds since January 1st 1970 00:00 with an identifier and then pass a reviver function to JSON.parse:

var myJSON = '{"MyDate":"@1269388885866@"}'
var myObj  = JSON.parse(myJSON, function (key, value)
{
   // Edit: don't forget to check the type == string!
   if (typeof value == "string" && value.slice(0, 1) == "@" && value.slice(-1) == "@")
       return new Date(+value.substring(1, -1));
   else
       return value;
}

Obviously, you'd need to use the native JSON object found in modern browsers or json2.js to use the reviver when parsing.

Answer 2

There is no special format for date literals.

In Javascript, you can write new Date(2010, 2, 23) (Months are zero-based, unfortunately).