Question

I am storing some information in a handwritten json file. One of the fields is a date (of which I need the month & year only.)

In the front end Im employing my JS Frameworks builtin conversion function to present that date into a more human readable format.

My question –
1. How do I get that json date in the first place. Is there a node or web app that can simplify conversions.
2. If I only need the month+year, is there a good way to ignore certain parts of the json date to forget about the specific date inside month and time?

Ref:
http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.filter:date

The Json itself is something simple like this –

[
 {
  "title": "One Dummy Book",
  "authors": "One Dummy Author",
  "pubdate": XXXXX
 },
 {
  "title": "Another Book",
  "authors": "Another Author"
  "pubdate": XXXXX
 }
]

How should I write down my publication date or pubdate

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there’s no specification for the serialization and deserialization of dates in JSON, so this is really up to you.

You can either standardize on using the unix timestamp, or a more readable value such as ISO-8601, and depending on whether you need your reviver to automatically be able to revivie the value as a Date, you might also need to add some kind of prefix or pattern that designates this as a date – eg ‘//date//1350157276920//date//’ or similar.

Since you only need the month and the year, using ISO-8601 syntax might be easier as it is simply ‘yyyy-mm’.