Question

I am getting the rfc3399 formatted date string through google calender web services. I want to convert this string into NSDate object so that I can add an event about this to the local calendar. I found the below method in Apple’s documentation regarding NSDateFormatter , but its not working

Date String – 2012-05-23T18:30:00.000-05:00

 - (NSString *)userVisibleDateTimeStringForRFC3339DateTimeString:(NSString *)rfc3339DateTimeString {
/*
 Returns a user-visible date time string that corresponds to the specified
 RFC 3339 date time string. Note that this does not handle all possible
 RFC 3339 date time strings, just one of the most common styles.
 */

NSDateFormatter *rfc3339DateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
NSLocale *enUSPOSIXLocale = [[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"en_US_POSIX"];

[rfc3339DateFormatter setLocale:enUSPOSIXLocale];
[rfc3339DateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss'Z'"];
[rfc3339DateFormatter setTimeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneForSecondsFromGMT:0]];

// Convert the RFC 3339 date time string to an NSDate.
NSDate *date = [rfc3339DateFormatter dateFromString:rfc3339DateTimeString];

NSString *userVisibleDateTimeString;
if (date != nil) {
    // Convert the date object to a user-visible date string.
    NSDateFormatter *userVisibleDateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    assert(userVisibleDateFormatter != nil);

    [userVisibleDateFormatter setDateStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];
    [userVisibleDateFormatter setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];

    userVisibleDateTimeString = [userVisibleDateFormatter stringFromDate:date];
}

return userVisibleDateTimeString;
}

Please help me , I have tried changing the date format quite a lot times but no success.

Answer 1

The issue is the date contains (-05:00 )’:’ in the timezone value … you have to remove it from the string then the above method will work fine……The new date string should look like below

2012-05-23T18:30:00.000-0500 – This should be the right format .