How to create a JSON object from a BSON string which contains ISODate

Question

I am trying to create a JSON object from a string which contains ISODate.

var teststring = '{ "_id" : "test001", "CreatedDate" : ISODate("2013-04-02T10:37:21.529Z") }';
console.log(JSON.parse(teststring));

Getting the ERROR:

undefined:1
{ "_id" : "test001", "CreatedDate" : ISODate("2013-04-02T10:37:21.529Z") }
                                     ^

Answer 1

To expand upon the answer by @user1896296

var valid = teststring.replace("ISODate(", "").replace(")", "");

is not very robust and shouldn't be used for production worthy code. Use a regular expression to do your replacement.

var isoRegex = /ISODate\((".+?")\)/g;
teststring = teststring.replace(isoRegex, function (match, parenGroup) {
    return parenGroup;
});
var parsedObj = JSON.parse(teststring);

This will work correctly even in this situation:

{
    "_id" : "test001",
    "RandomUserInput" : "Sometimes I like to say ISODate(\"2013-04-02T10:37:21.529Z\") in the body of my replies!",
    "CreatedDate" : ISODate("2013-04-02T10:37:21.529Z")
}

Since any double quotes inside the user's input must be escaped, the regular expression can't possibly match on user-supplied input.

Furthermore, if you actually want to parse those fields into date objects, you could write a helper function like so:

var isoRegex = /"([^"]+?)"\s*:\s*ISODate\((".+?")\)/g;
function parseBson (bson) {
    var dateProps = [];
    bson = bson.replace(isoRegex, function (match, propName, dateStr) {
        dateProps.push(propName);
        return '"' + propName + '" : ' + dateStr;
    });

    var obj = JSON.parse(bson);

    for (var i in dateProps)
        obj[dateProps[i]] = new Date(obj[dateProps[i]]);

    return obj;
}

var parsedObj = parseBson(teststring);

Note, this function would only work for top-level attributes. Trying to automatically convert nested properties would get tricky.