Question

I am trying to deserialize a json object that has a javascript date in it. When JSON.stringify is called on the object, dates are serialized to strings that are not properly deserialized back to dates. I have attempted to deserialize the object using both the native browser implementation with chrome, IE, and FF and using jquery. Both give the some results. Here is the snippet:

var obj = {Date: new Date()};
var objSer = JSON.stringify(obj);
var objDeser = JSON.parse(objSer);
var objJqDeser = $.parseJSON(objSer);

function getYear(value){
  try{
     return value.getYear();
  }
  catch(err){
    return err;
  }
}

$("#orig").text("Orig Year: " + getYear(obj.Date));
$("#deser").text("Deser Year: " + getYear(objDeser.Date));
$("#jqDeser").text("JqDeser Year: " + getYear(objJqDeser.Date));

I want objDeser.Date to be a js date not a string. You can see this problem in action here: http://jsbin.com/unijud/24/edit. Is there any js libraries that can properly deserialize the dates when building the javascript object?

Answer 1

I took @LastCoder advice and wrote a simple implementation. It seems to be doing what I wanted it to.

var jsonDates = {
  dtrx2: /\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}/,
  parse: function(obj){
      var parsedObj = JSON.parse(obj);
      return this.parseDates(parsedObj);
  },
  parseDates: function(obj){
    // iterate properties
    for(pName in obj){

      // make sure the property is 'truthy'
      if (obj[pName]){
        var value = obj[pName];
        // determine if the property is an array
        if (Array.isArray(value)){
          for(var ii = 0; ii < value.length; ii++){
            this.parseDates(value[ii]);
          }
        }
        // determine if the property is an object
        else if (typeof(value) == "object"){
          this.parseDates(value);
        }
        // determine if the property is a string containing a date
        else if (typeof(value) == "string" && this.dtrx2.test(value)){
          // parse and replace
          obj[pName] = new Date(obj[pName]);
        }
      }
    }

    return obj;
  }
};

A live example is available on jsbin. A reference is available on gist.