Question

Hopefully this is just a quick one and I’m missing something simple…

I’ve got an NSDateFormatter, which I’m using to convert the string 2011-11-10 into a Date object.

NSDateFormatter *fmtDate = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[fmtDate setDateFormat:@"YYYY-MM-DD"];

// input of 2011-11-10, output of 2011-01-10 00:00:00 +0000        
[appointment setDate:[fmtDate dateFromString:
  [tempAppointment objectForKey:@"date"]
]];

The return from the NSDateFormatter is stored in a managedObjectContext. My problem is that the dateFormatter is returning the date as 2011-01-10 00:00:00 +0000

Why is it reducing the month from Nobvember to January? It’s retaining the year and the day fine, but not the month.

Do I need to include the hours when I store the date? Or is it something to do with the format I set?

Answer 1

Your date format string is not correct using YYYY. Try yyyy-M-d or yyyy-MM-dd

NSString *dateString = @"2011-11-10";

NSDateFormatter *fmtDate = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[fmtDate setDateFormat:@"yyyy-M-d"];

NSDate *date = [fmtDate dateFromString:dateString];
NSLog(@"date: %@", date);

Outputs:

2011-11-10 20:01:40.638 Craplet[81514:707] date: 2011-11-10 05:00:00 +0000

See:

http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-10.html#Date_Format_Patterns