Easily stringify and parse any object including objects with circular references or dates, using the familar parse and stringify methods.
var jsan = require('jsan');
var obj = {};
obj['self'] = obj;
obj['sub'] = {};
obj['sub']['subSelf'] = obj['sub'];
obj.now = new Date();
var str = jsan.stringify(obj);
str === '{"self":{"$ref":"$"},"sub":{"subSelf":{"$ref":"[\\"sub\\"]"}},"now":{"$ref":{"$date":"2015-03-24T15:08:00.000Z"}}}'; // true
var obj2 = jsan.parse(str);
obj2 === obj2['self']; // true
obj2['sub']['subSelf'] === obj2['sub']; // true
obj2.now instanceof Date; // trueNow with 100% less eval!
This ulitilty has been heavily optimized and performs as well as the native JSON.parse and JSON.stringify. It doesn't by default handle self references (non-circular), or dates when stringifing but you can force it to by passing in true as a forth arg:
var obj = {};
var subObj = {};
obj.a = subObj;
obj.b = subObj;
var str1 = jsan.stringify(obj) // '{"a":{},"b":{}}'
var str2 = jsan.stringify(obj, null, null, true) // '{"a":{},"b":{"$ref":"[\\"a\\"]"}}'
obj = {now: new Date()};
var str1 = jsan.stringify(obj) // '{"now":"2015-03-24T15:13:23.291Z"}'
var str2 = jsan.stringify(obj, null, null, true) // '{"now":{"$ref":{"$date":"2015-03-24T15:13:23.291Z"}}}'