Laravel: Unexpected Behavior of Date in JSON Response - laravel

Question

I am making a web service in Laravel which is returning JSON.
I have created an Account model like so:
class Account extends Eloquent {
// The database table used by the model.
// (If not defined then lowercase and plural of class name is consider as a table name)
protected $table = "account";
// define which column can be mass assign
protected $fillable = array("user_id", "account_group_id", "generated_by", "image", "name",
"address", "zip", "area_id", "mobile", "email", "phone", "fax",
"website", "pan", "cst", "tin", "ecc", "iesc", "transport",
"other", "outstanding", "cform", "status", "mitp");
// To prevent column from mass assignment.
protected $guarded = array('id');
// Change Variable for CREATED_AT and UPDATED_AT
const CREATED_AT = 'itp';
const UPDATED_AT = 'utp';
}
I am fetching fields from Account using user_id and returning JSON via Response::json() in my controller
$accountData = Account::select('name', 'status', 'id', 'user_id', 'utp')->where('user_id', Auth::id())->first();
$return = array(
'result' => 'success',
'msg' => 'Login Successfully.',
'data' => $accountData
);
return Response::json($return);
In this, utp behaves as expected and returns a date as a string:
{
"result": "success",
"msg": "Login Successfully.",
"data": {
"name": "Demo",
"status": 0,
"id": 143,
"user_id": 207,
"utp": "2015-07-01 18:38:01"
}
}
However if I take each value separately from the account model like so:
$return = array(
'result' => 'success',
'msg' => 'Login Successfully.',
'data' => $accountData['user_id'],
'account_id' => $accountData['id'],
'utp' => $accountData['utp'],
'usertype' => 'account',
'status' => $accountData['status']
);
Then this gives some unexpected behavior from utp
{
"result": "success",
"msg": "Login Successfully.",
"data": 207,
"account_id": 143,
"utp": {
"date": "2015-07-01 18:38:01",
"timezone_type": 3,
"timezone": "Asia\\/Kolkata"
},
"usertype": "account",
"status": 0
}
Why does this happen with my timestamp field?

Answer 1

Because utp is a Carbon\Carbon instance. Model::toJson (actually Model::toArray, but both are used) handles that usually, and serializes a date to it's usual ISO3601-ish format
For expected behavior, you need to format the Carbon instance.
"utp" => $accountData['utp']->format("Y-m-d H:i:s"),
Alternatively, cast it to a string
"utp" => (string) $accountData['utp'],