Question

I have one string like this “2012 12 12 12:12”, how to format as a Date ?

I try this but not work

-(NSDate *)stringToDate:(NSString *)date
{
    NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    NSTimeZone *timeZone = [NSTimeZone localTimeZone];

    [formatter setTimeZone:timeZone];
    [formatter setDateFormat : @"yyyy MM dd HH:mm"];

    NSString *stringTime = date;

    NSDate *dateTime = [formatter dateFromString:stringTime];
    [formatter release];
    return dateTime;
}

Update: when I change the position of formatter, it also can not work by:

NSLog(@"%@", stringToDate(@"2012 12 12 12:12"));

It outputs “null”, But it works with string format like “2012-12-12 12:12”

Answer 1

Change this,

[formatter setDateFormat : @"yyyy MM dd HH:mm"];
[formatter release];
NSString *stringTime = date;
NSDate *dateTime = [formatter dateFromString:stringTime];

to

[formatter setDateFormat : @"yyyy MM dd HH:mm"];
NSString *stringTime = date;
NSDate *dateTime = [formatter dateFromString:stringTime];
[formatter release];

Don’t release formatter until you are done with the use of it in converting from string to date. In your code, you are releasing it before the conversion itself.

Update:

You need to use it as,

NSLog(@"%@", [self stringToDate:@"2012 12 12 12:12"]);

You can not use stringToDate(@"2012 12 12 12:12") in objective-c. Equivalent here is [self stringToDate:@"2012 12 12 12:12"].