How do JSON-RPC users handle datetimes?

[Andrew Pennebaker]

Do JSON-RPC users tend to use strings for datetimes? Could we reduce errors if there was a datetime data type in the JSON spec?

[James Cooper]

On the last project I did we expressed time as milliseconds since epoch (e.g. System.currentTimeMillis() in Java).  

Good: easy to parse, no timezone issues.

Bad: not easily human readable

-- James

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 7:50 AM, Andrew Pennebaker <apenne...@gmail.com> wrote:

Do JSON-RPC users tend to use strings for datetimes? Could we reduce errors if there was a datetime data type in the JSON spec?

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James Cooper
http://blog.bitmechanic.com/

[Shane Green]

Also, although a date/time data type might be useful in many ways, the data types available to JSON-RPC are defined by the JSON standard, and universal compatibility and consistency across platforms is probably the most important factor...  I've generally found ISO string representations are most "JSON" like in that they're both human readable and concise.  I definitely understand the motivation.

Sent from my iPad

[Stephan Arts]

I always use the ISO 8601 Profile as described by W3C on http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss(Z|[+-]hh:mm)

Human readable, and precise enough for my needs possibly you could add something to support milliseconds like this:

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss(.uuu)?(Z|[+-]hh:mm)