Serializing dates with JSON

gistfile1.js

var date = new Date();
console.log(date);
var dateAsString = JSON.stringify(date);
console.log(dateAsString);
var dateAsObj = new Date(JSON.parse(dateAsString));
console.log(dateAsObj);

Ah, I see. My situation is that I am trying to put an object with a Date embedded far down into localStorage. E.g.:

var o = { name: "Peter", data: { date: new Date(), score: 123 } }

If I want to store that object in LS I guess I need to create a wrapper library that knows about special kinds of objects?

Maybe the already exisiting wrapper libraries (i.e. those that @pamelafox mentioned at Jfokus) do this already. The caching wrapper lscache doesn't seem to do it (that's where I ran into it).

Well, you could stringify the date on its own as part of an object, and then parse into an object again when you access it:

var date = new Date();
console.log(date);
var dateAsString = JSON.stringify(date);

var testObj = {
name : "Peter",
date : dateAsString
};

var objAsString = JSON.stringify(testObj);
var objAsObj = JSON.parse(objAsString);
console.log(objAsObj);
console.log(JSON.parse(objAsObj.date));

What I am afraid of is putting the date parsing code deep down in the code that uses the structure. Since the stringification of the Date object is a side effect of me using caching (lscache) elsewhere, that code should need to care about it. Likewise, the caching code should not need to know about the structure and contents of the data (that there is a date here and something else there).

I think I need to rethink my implementation or write a wrapper that can automatically recognize Dates, etc and parse them (by prefixing values in the JSON with the data type, perhaps).

Thanks for your help, it's very much appreciated!

I understand. Well, you need to assess what you need to do and what works best for you.
Good luck!