Question

I know this been asked for so many times but I always end up getting null in my NSDate. I have a string like this “January 16, 2012 21:44:56” I want to convert it to “January 16, 2012 09:44:56 PM”. I want to add a PM in the converted date and convert the 24 hour time format to 12 hour time format. Here’s my code.

    NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"MMMM dd, YYYY HH:ii:ss a"];

    NSDate *dateFromString = [[NSDate alloc] init];
    dateFromString = [dateFormatter dateFromString:dateString];

Answer 1

As Ali3n correctly pointed out, you should first set the format of dateString to the formatter to get a valid date object. Next you should set the formatter’s format to the desired one and continue. Do the following:

NSString *dateString = @"January 16, 2012 21:44:56";
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"MMMM dd, yyyy HH:mm:ss"];

NSDate *dateFromString;
dateFromString = [dateFormatter dateFromString:dateString];

[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"MMMM dd, YYYY HH:mm:ss a"];
NSString *stringFromDate  = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:dateFromString];