Question: Forgive me as I'm new to Objective C. 

I am getting back dates from a .NET webservice in the /Date(xxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxx)/ format. I'm looking for some direction on how to best parse this into an NSDate object. I've tried using dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970 on it but it comes back with a date in the year 1969 for a date I know is in 2006. 

Looking for some direction on the proper way to handle JSON dates.

Thanks in advance!

Answer: 
I just wrote this for iOS 4.0+ (because it uses NSRegularExpression). It handles dates with or without timezone offsets. Seems to work pretty well, what do you think?

```
+ (NSDate *)mfDateFromDotNetJSONString:(NSString *)string {
    static NSRegularExpression *dateRegEx = nil;
    static dispatch_once_t onceToken;
    dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{
        dateRegEx = [[NSRegularExpression alloc] initWithPattern:@"^\\/date\\((-?\\d++)(?:([+-])(\\d{2})(\\d{2}))?\\)\\/$" options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:nil];
    });
    NSTextCheckingResult *regexResult = [dateRegEx firstMatchInString:string options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [string length])];

    if (regexResult) {
        // milliseconds
        NSTimeInterval seconds = [[string substringWithRange:[regexResult rangeAtIndex:1]] doubleValue] / 1000.0;
        // timezone offset
        if ([regexResult rangeAtIndex:2].location != NSNotFound) {
            NSString *sign = [string substringWithRange:[regexResult rangeAtIndex:2]];
            // hours
            seconds += [[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@", sign, [string substringWithRange:[regexResult rangeAtIndex:3]]] doubleValue] * 60.0 * 60.0;
            // minutes
            seconds += [[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@", sign, [string substringWithRange:[regexResult rangeAtIndex:4]]] doubleValue] * 60.0;
        }

        return [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970:seconds];
    }
    return nil;
}

```
I actually found the snippet with NSRegularExpression pretty useful, till i came up with another solution that uses NSCharecterSet for stipping off the milliseconds.

```
+ (NSDate*) dateFromJSONString:(NSString *)dateString
{
    NSCharacterSet *charactersToRemove = [[ NSCharacterSet decimalDigitCharacterSet ] invertedSet ];
    NSString* milliseconds = [dateString stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:charactersToRemove];   

    if (milliseconds != nil && ![milliseconds isEqualToString:@"62135596800000"]) {
        NSTimeInterval  seconds = [milliseconds doubleValue] / 1000;
        return [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970:seconds];
    }
    return nil;
}

```

Saves a lot of the manual string processing and makes the code much cleaner.