Date are stringifyed

• report a bug
• request a feature

sending a Date object is stringifyed

Steps to reproduce

var server = require('socket.io').listen(4000);
var client = require('socket.io-client').connect('http://localhost:4000');

server.on('connection', function(socket) {
  socket.on('message', function(msg) {
    console.log(typeof msg.myDate); //string
  });
});

client.on('connect', function() {
  client.emit('message', { myDate: new Date() });
});

Expected behaviour

shoud receive a Date Object

Setup

• OS: Fedora
• browser: Node.js
• socket.io version: 2.2.0

[atiertant]

@deskoh yes but what about Buffer… couldn’t we have the same behavior ?

[kputh]

I think the API documentation of the sending and receiving methods should state that data is serialized and deserialized using JSON.stringify and JSON.parse. These two functions have some suprising behaviour: they do not only replace Dates with strings, but also strip undefined-valued properties from objects and replace undefined with null in arrays. It may not seem like a big deal, but it implied that types for sending and receiving the same data may not line up at runtime and in TypeScript.