Parsing a JSON date info into a C# DateTime

Question

I have a a WCF service that returns a CLR object. This object is defined as follows:

[DataContract]
public class Person
{
  [DataMember]
  public string Full         


        

Answer 1

Well, lately I had to work on an Android Mobile (Xamarin Studio) app project where I was unable to use Newtonsoft Json (Json.NET) due to errors thrown during deployment to this specific device version (Android API 16 Version 4.2.1).

Luckly I found an alternative library for json (System.Json). However this library does not have a way of casting JSON date to C# DateTime implicitly.

I have created the following two functions for nullable date and date conversions from a string json date(i.e /Date(1389435240000+0000)/)

The code can be improved but it does the job for now

public static DateTime? ConvertToNallableDate(string date)
        {

            DateTime? val = null;
            /*          /Date(1389435240000+0000)/*/
            try{
                if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(date))
                {
                    date = date.Replace ("/Date(", string.Empty).Replace (")/", string.Empty);
                    int pIndex = date.IndexOf ("+");
                    if(pIndex < 0) pIndex = date.IndexOf("-");
                    long millisec = 0;
                    date = date.Remove (pIndex);
                    long.TryParse (date, out millisec);
                    System.Globalization.CultureInfo ci = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-GB");
                    DateTime newDate = DateTime.Parse ("1970,1,1", ci);
                    newDate = newDate.AddMilliseconds(millisec);
                    val = newDate == null ? (DateTime?)null : newDate;

                }
            }catch {
                val = null;
            }
            return val;
        }

        public static DateTime ConvertToDate(string date)
        {

            DateTime val = new DateTime();
            /*/Date(1389435240000+0000)/*/
            try{
            if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(date))
            {
                date = date.Replace ("/Date(", string.Empty).Replace (")/", string.Empty);
                int pIndex = date.IndexOf ("+");
                if(pIndex < 0) pIndex = date.IndexOf("-");
                long millisec = 0;
                date = date.Remove (pIndex);
                long.TryParse (date, out millisec);
                System.Globalization.CultureInfo ci = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-GB");
                DateTime newDate = DateTime.Parse ("1970,1,1", ci);
                val = newDate.AddMilliseconds(millisec);

            }
            }catch {
                val = new DateTime();
            }
            return val;
        }