Question

All,

I have a method that takes a date (YYYY-MM-DD H:M:S) from the database and creates a URL with the year, month and day components from the date string. My solution works but I was wondering if there is a better way to do this? How are the cool kids doing it? 🙂

Thanks!

   -(NSString *) prettyURLFrom:(NSString *)dateString{



    NSString * URLString = @"";
    NSString *URL = @"http://www.theblues.com/featured/article/";

    NSArray *myWords = [dateString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:
                        [NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:@"-\" \" :"]
                        ];


    URLString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@/%@/%@", 
                    URL,
                    [myWords objectAtIndex:1],
                    [myWords objectAtIndex:2],
                    [myWords objectAtIndex:0]];



    return URLString;


   }

Answer 1

Like I said in the comments, I find it bizarre you’re passing and returning values as strings when they probably should be NSDate and NSURL respectively.

I would probably do something like:

-(NSURL*)URLFromDate:(NSDate*)date
{
    // Assumes user uses a gregorian calendar
    NSDateComponents *dateComp = [[NSCalendar currentCalendar] components:(NSYearCalendarUnit | NSMonthCalendarUnit |  NSDayCalendarUnit) fromDate:date];

    return [NSURL URLWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://www.theblues.com/featured/article/%li/%li/%li"
                                    , [dateComp year]
                                    , [dateComp month]
                                    , [dateComp day]]];
}