How to convert BSON to JSON with human-readable date format

Question

I would like to transform a BSON dump of MongoDB to JSON.

To do that, I'm using the bsondump tool provided with Mongo, but I get an output like :

{ "_id" : ObjectId( "5316d194b34f6a0c8776e187" ), "begin_date" : Date( 1394004372038 ), "foo" : "bar" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId( "5316d198b34f6a0c8776e188" ), "begin_date" : Date( 1394004407696 ), "foo" : "bar" }

Can anyone tell me how to get the dates appear in a human readable format (e.g. hh:mm:ss dd/mm/yyyy) ?

Edit

It looks like that a more recent version of mongodump outputs dates as:

{ "_id" : ObjectId( "5316d194b34f6a0c8776e187" ), "begin_date" : {"$date":"2015-11-11T08:45:03.974Z"}}, "foo" : "bar" }

So this question is not relevant anymore. Thanks everybody for your help here.

Just using command line. My purpose is to analyse the content of the dump. — vcarel, Apr 11 '14 at 10:54
Actually, try mongoexport instead. You should get a form out of that which is a little more convertible. — Neil Lunn, Apr 11 '14 at 10:57
Actually, mongoexport still outputs timestamps instead of "human" dates. — vcarel, Apr 11 '14 at 15:30
Displaying with find() works (meaning I also have to import the BSON file into my database, which is a bit annoying). However, for a big table, this is not convenient at all ! — vcarel, Apr 11 '14 at 15:46
If your intention is to analyse the data then you can try [some online bson to json converters like this](https://json-bson-converter.appspot.com/). — Adolphus Ald, Dec 26 '16 at 03:14

score 65 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 01 '18 at 04:58

bsondump converts BSON files into human-readable formats, including JSON. For example, bsondump is useful for reading the output files generated by mongodump.

Source: https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/program/bsondump

Examples

bsondump --outFile collection.json collection.bson

The --pretty option outputs documents in a pretty-printed format JSON, eg:

bsondump --pretty --outFile collection.json collection.bson

score 21 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 10 '17 at 16:42

21

To create a JSON file directly from the database, use mongoexport

mongoexport --db myDatabase --collection myCollection --jsonArray --out myJsonFile.json

edited Feb 10 '17 at 16:42

Ryan

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answered Sep 05 '14 at 17:19

Lars

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Same, the date format is { "$date" : 1397141347767 } – vcarel Sep 08 '14 at 14:38
@vcarel when I do a `db.test.insert({"begin_date" : Date( 1394004372038 ), "foo" : "bar" })` and then `[{ "_id" : { "$oid" : "540bfc4d6b29db6430fcd93e" }, "begin_date" : "Sun Sep 07 2014 08:33:49 GMT+0200 (CEST)", "foo" : "bar" }]` I get: `[{ "_id" : { "$oid" : "540bfc4d6b29db6430fcd93e" }, "begin_date" : "Sun Sep 07 2014 08:33:49 GMT+0200 (CEST)", "foo" : "bar" }]` in test.json – Lars Sep 09 '14 at 09:37
Apparently, Date(something) returns the current time as a string. If you try new Date(1394004372038) you'll get in the export "begin_date" : { "$date" : 1394004372038 } – vcarel Sep 09 '14 at 09:53

score -2 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 12 '21 at 13:43

-2

db.players.find({"name" : "John"}).forEach(printjson);

answered Oct 12 '21 at 13:43

Krešimir Prcela

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How to convert BSON to JSON with human-readable date format

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