Question

I need to find a date format which could adapt to the two following dates:

1. 2012-01-22T14:27:31.176+0000
2. 2012-01-22T14:27:31+0000

As you can see, the only difference is that date 2 does not have the fractional seconds.

The two date formats would be:

1. yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SZ
2. yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ

with the second one omitting .S.

Is it possible to make .S optional? Or do I have to keep using 2 different formats?

The problem lies in the fact that I’m getting the date from an API call, and sometimes it comes with the fractional seconds, other times without.

I guess I could detect the presence of the decimal place and use the two different date formats accordingly, but I was looking for a cleaner solution.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The “lenient” property suggested by @JustSid in this case did not work.

Having not found a “cleaner” solution, I went back to my first one, which was detecting the presence of the decimal place and using the two different date formats accordingly.

NSRange textRange =[targetDate rangeOfString:@"."];

if(textRange.location == NSNotFound) {
    format = @"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ";
} else {
    format = @"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SZ";
}