Just to expand on casperOne's answer.
The JSON spec does not account for Date values. MS had to make a call, and the path they chose was to exploit a little trick in the javascript representation of strings: the string literal "/" is the same as "/", and a string literal will never get serialized to "/" (even "/" must be mapped to "\/").
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb299886.aspx#intro_to_json_topic2 for a better explanation (scroll down to "From JavaScript Literals to JSON")
One of the sore points of JSON is the
lack of a date/time literal. Many
people are surprised and disappointed
to learn this when they first
encounter JSON. The simple explanation
(consoling or not) for the absence of
a date/time literal is that JavaScript
never had one either: The support for
date and time values in JavaScript is
entirely provided through the Date
object. Most applications using JSON
as a data format, therefore, generally
tend to use either a string or a
number to express date and time
values. If a string is used, you can
generally expect it to be in the ISO
8601 format. If a number is used,
instead, then the value is usually
taken to mean the number of
milliseconds in Universal Coordinated
Time (UTC) since epoch, where epoch is
defined as midnight January 1, 1970
(UTC). Again, this is a mere
convention and not part of the JSON
standard. If you are exchanging data
with another application, you will
need to check its documentation to see
how it encodes date and time values
within a JSON literal. For example,
Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX uses neither
of the described conventions. Rather,
it encodes .NET DateTime values as a
JSON string, where the content of the
string is /Date(ticks)/ and where
ticks represents milliseconds since
epoch (UTC). So November 29, 1989,
4:55:30 AM, in UTC is encoded as
"/Date(628318530718)/".
A solution would be to just parse it out:
value = new Date(parseInt(value.replace("/Date(", "").replace(")/",""), 10));
However I've heard that there is a setting somewhere to get the serializer to output DateTime objects with the new Date(xxx) syntax. I'll try to dig that out.
The second parameter of JSON.parse() accepts a reviver function where prescribes how the value originally produced by, before being returned.
Here is an example for date:
var parsed = JSON.parse(data, function(key, value) {
if (typeof value === 'string') {
var d = //Date((d*))//.exec(value);
return (d) ? new Date(+d[1]) : value;
}
return value;
});
See the docs of JSON.parse()
