Question

I have an NSDateformatter that is not working correctly. I got my date as a string like this.

2013-02-20 00:00:00

And I need to return it as an NSDate like this

2013-02-20

What I’ve got at the moment is this.

 NSDateFormatter *dateFormat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
 [dateFormat setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss"];

[dateFormat setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"];
[dateFormat dateFromString:dateString]

But this is not working.
Any help ?

Answer 1

if you have more than on date to parse, it could be worthy to create one input and one output date formatter

static NSDateFormatter *inputDateFormatter;
static NSDateFormatter *outputDateFormatter;
if (!inputDateFormatter) {
    inputDateFormatter= [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [inputDateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss"];

    outputDateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [outputDateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"];
}
NSDate *date = [inputDateFormatter dateFromString:@"2013-02-20 00:00:00"];

NSString *string = [outputDateFormatter stringFromDate:date];

NSLog(@"%@", string);

result

2013-02-20

as NSDateFormatter are expensive to create, you should either store them in a singleton or declare them static to create them once for that method.

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And I need to return it as an NSDate like this

A date has no format, it is just a point in time. you will have to creta a string with the desired format where needed.