Question

Hello I am new to iPhone development and I am making an app which recieves the date and time from web services like this 2012-02-23T00:14:13.853. I then need to show how old the information is according to the current date.

What I want is a relative time such as in Facebook or Twitter, e.g. 1 day ago, 2 hours ago etc.

So how should we convert that date into such a format?

Answer 1

You can use Shubhank’s code above, but you will have to convert your string into an NSDate first. In case you don’t know how to do this:

NSString *receivedString = yourStringFromWebservice;
NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[formatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss'Z'"];
NSDate *receivedDate = [formatter dateFromString:receivedString];
[formatter release];

You can then use the resulting NSDate in the code above.