Proper way to format date from database using javascript/jquery

Question

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

Answer 1

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).