Parsing JSON dates on IPhone

user_213517 0
Viewed 19567

Forgive me as I'm new to Objective C.

I am getting back dates from a .NET webservice in the /Date(xxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxx)/ format. I'm looking for some direction on how to best parse this into an NSDate object. I've tried using dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970 on it but it comes back with a date in the year 1969 for a date I know is in 2006.

Looking for some direction on the proper way to handle JSON dates.

Thanks in advance!

objective-c datetime iphone json
7 Answers

I was in the same boat whilst using json-framework which doesn't support the date format as it's not official JSON. My source is from an API built using JSON.Net. This is what I came up with:

- (NSDate*) getDateFromJSON:(NSString *)dateString
{
    // Expect date in this format "/Date(1268123281843)/"
    int startPos = [dateString rangeOfString:@"("].location+1;
    int endPos = [dateString rangeOfString:@")"].location;
    NSRange range = NSMakeRange(startPos,endPos-startPos);
    unsigned long long milliseconds = [[dateString substringWithRange:range] longLongValue];
    NSLog(@"%llu",milliseconds);
    NSTimeInterval interval = milliseconds/1000;
    return [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970:interval];
}

I don't have the appended portion in the date format that you do so I haven't dealt with that like the answer above. No error catching either, it's all new to me at this point.

user_974290
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