Question

I’d like to get the current hour and minute as integers. So if right now is 3:16am, I’d like to get the two integers: 3 and 16.

But it looks like [NSDate date] will give the number of seconds since 1970, or it can give a string of the current time representation, but there is no easy way to get them as integers?

I see a post in Getting current time, but it involved NSDateComponents and NSCalendar? That’s way too complicated… all that was need is something like

NSDate *date = [NSDate date];
int hour = [date getHour];     // which is not possible

Is there a simpler way than using 3 classes NSDate, NSDateComponents, and NSCalendar to get the current hour as an integer, or typically, in Objective-C, would we typically still use C language’s localtime and tm to get the hour as an integer?

Answer 1

NSDate just holds the time that has passed since a certain reference date, to get more meaningful numbers out of this (eg. after taking care of DST, leap years and all the other stupid time stuff), you have to use NSDateComponents with the appropriate NSCalendar.