Proper way to format date from database using javascript/jquery

I am calling my database which contains a datetime datatype. The date looks like this:

2005-05-23 16:06:00.000

I would like to display this in a table when a user selects a certain item from a list. I call my controller action and return Json of all the times and put them in a table. The problem is the date is completely wrong. What is displayed is this:

/Date(1255470180000)/

The date that开发者_高级运维 is returned isn't even parsable (which I don't want to do anyway) so I can't even get the data if I wanted to. Any ideas?

The date you're getting back is serialized to a marker and a number of milliseconds since midnight 1st Jan 1970 (in UTC). If you isolate the numeric portion, convert it into a number, and feed it into the Date constructor you'll get an actual date to work with, which you can then format as you like.

var ticks, dt;

// Isolate the numeric portion of the value
ticks = /[0-9]+/.exec(json.dateValue)[0];

// Convert to a number
ticks = parseInt(ticks);

// Convert to a date
dt = new Date(ticks);

Alternately, if the JSON serializer on the server supports a "replacer" parameter as Crockford's and ECMAScript 5th edition's do, you could supply a replacer that formatted the date into a string server-side and handle it there, since you said you don't want to parse the date client-side (although the jQuery tag suggested to me maybe you did).

The other alternative is to return the formatted string from the controller action. You could even leave the timestamp and return a second field as "Formatted Timestamp" or something similar.

var listFromDb = ...
return new Json(listFromDb.Select(itemFromDb => new List { new 
     { Date = itemFromDb.Date, FormattedDate = FormatDate(itemFromDb.Date), ...}

I ended up formatting the code in the controller action instead.

I just cast the datetime property to a string using .ToString() and got the desired results.

Thanks for the help though guys.