Question

If I’m not interested in the time can I ignore it? I.e I have a date string that looks like this @"2012-12-19T14:00:00" but I’m only interested in getting the date (2012-12-19) but if I set NSDateFormatter like [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"]; it will return me a nil NSDate.

Answer 1

An NSDate object will always contain a time component as well, as it is representing a point in time — from this perspective one could argue the name NSDate is misleading.

You should create a date formatter for creating dates from string, set the time to the start of the day and use a second date formatter to output the date without time component.

NSString *dateString = @"2012-12-19T14:00:00";

NSDateFormatter *inputFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[inputFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss"];

NSDateFormatter *outputFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[outputFormatter setDateStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];
[outputFormatter setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterNoStyle];

NSDate *date = [inputFormatter dateFromString:dateString];

//this will set date's time components to 00:00
[[NSCalendar currentCalendar] rangeOfUnit:NSDayCalendarUnit
                                startDate:&date
                                 interval:NULL
                                  forDate:date];

NSString *outputString = [outputFormatter stringFromDate:date];

NSLog(@"%@", outputString);

results in

19.12.12

while the format — as it is chosen by styling — will be dependent of your environment locale