Question

Is there an accepted way to represent high resolution timestamps in JSON and/or JavaScript?

Ideally, I would like it to support at least 100 ns resolution, since that would make the server code a bit simpler (since the .NET DateTime resolution is 100 ns as well).

I found a lot of questions dealing with manipulating high-resolution timers and such (which is not possible, apparently), but I simply need to represent it somehow, in an application API.

This is for an API built in REST style using JSON, so actually measuring time in this resolution is not required. However, I would like to transfer and use (potentially in JavaScript) the timestamp in its full resolution (100 ns, since this is .NET).

Answer 1

In light of your clarification, isn’t your timestamp just a really big integer? The current timestamp is 1329826212. If you want nanosecond precision, we are just talking about like 9 more digits: 1329826212000000000. That is a number that JavaScript can easily handle. Just send it over as:

myobject = {
    "time": 1329826212000000000
}

It should be perfectly fine. I just tried doing some arithmetic operations on it, division by a large number and multiplication by the same. There is no loss of value.

JavaScript supports a huge range of floating point numbers, but guarantees integral accuracy from -2^53 to 2^53. So I think you are good to go.

UPDATE
I’m sorry, I just re-read your question. You wish to represent it? Well, one thing I can think of is to extract the last 9 digits (additional precision beyond second granularity) and show them to be the decimal part of the number. You may even wish to extract the last 6 digis (additional precision beyond the millisecond granularity).