PHP date format /Date(1365004652303-0500)/

Question

I am calling an API from where I am getting date /Date(1365004652303-0500)/, I don\'t understand what format this is. How is this date format called? I was not

Answer 1

I had some slightly different experience which led me to make a couple of slight changes to Baba's excellent answer.

Using Newtonsoft's JSON library to encode messages in .NET, which I then send to our website (the PHP part), I get a space before the timezone offset, and no +/- character.

I have also seen negative numbers from pre-epoch dates which means I needed to cater for a - sign before the millisecond value.

I altered the regex to this and it works perfectly for me:

^/Date(([-]?\d{10})(\d{3})\s?([+-]?\d{4}))/$

The two differences are

[-]? before the 10-digit millisecond value, and \s? before the timezone offset.

I would put this as a comment on Baba's answer, but my lack of reputation doesn't permit me. I hope this is appropriate for me to post here as I thought it might be useful.