Question

I have data coming to my app which is a date stored in a string as follows:
“Tuesday 31st January 2011 10:15am”.

I have tried using dateFromString, and then NSDateFormatter to change it into another format (ideally I would like it displayed as hh:mm (24 hour) dd/mm/yyyy). I cannot find a way to remove the weekday name, and so whenever I try to print the result it comes out as null.

NSDateFormatter *df = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
//is EEEE is for weekdays?

[df setDateFormat:@"EEEE-dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm a"];

NSDate *myDate = [df dateFromString:[[_feeds[_currentTableView] objectAtIndex:row] objectForKey:@"created"]];

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

NSDateFormatter *timeFormat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[timeFormat setDateFormat:@"HH:mm"];

NSDate *now = [[NSDate alloc] init];

NSString *theDate = [dateFormat stringFromDate:myDate];
NSString *theTime = [timeFormat stringFromDate:myDate];

NSLog(@"\n"
      "theDate: |%@| \n"
      "theTime: |%@| \n"
      , theDate, theTime);

[dateFormat release];
[timeFormat release];
[now release];

Can anyone help out? Thanks

Answer 1

You should isolate the problem to either parsing or formatting. My guess is that it’s the parsing. Here’s your sample string:

 "Tuesday 31st January 2011 10:15am"

And your format:

 "EEEE-dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm a"

They don’t match:

• There are no hyphens in your sample text
• There’s “st” after “31” – I’m not sure how you’ll handle that
• The month is given as a name, not a number, so I suspect you want “MMMM” (if iOS’s format specifiers are like other ones I’m familiar with)
• There’s no space between “15” and “am”

Leaving aside the “st” part, I suspect you’d want a format of:

 "EEEE dd MMMM yyyy hh:mma"

… but I don’t know how you’ll deal with the “st” (or “th” or “nd”) elegantly, other than by just messing with the string explicitly.