I haven't been able to find an answer to this, and I was hoping y'all could help me out. When accessing the API for one of the products we use at work, a date field comes back in two different forms depending on if you request JSON or XML.
The first, which I understand, is what XML sends:

2014-12-03T23:59:00

The second, is what I can't figure out. When requesting JSON, it sends the same date in the following format:

\/Date(1417672740000-0600)\/

Forgive me if this has already been answered, I just haven't been able to find it here or on Google. Hopefully it's something I should already know.
FYI, I'm using the requests module for Python.
Jon Skeet:

Looks like it's the format from DataContractJsonSerializer apart from anything else - millis since the Unix epoch, and offset from UTC
API Date in a Strange Format