Question

I’m developing an OS X desktop application which will track time for a car racing event.

The difference between pilots can be very small, so the collected data for each lap has a floating point value for the seconds:

bestLap = @"00:01:39.5930000"

But I need to compare each pilot’s time and sort it. I’m trying to convert it to a NSDate object, using NSDateFormatter and I couldn’t manage to make it work

Is it possible to convert a string like that to a NSDate? If so, how can I compare and sort an array containing NSDates

Thanks

Answer 1

An NSDate is used to represent a date, not a time interval.

Also, if the purpose is just to sort them, there is no need to convert the string into an NSDate or NSTimeInterval since they are already lexicographically ordered if a time interval is shorter than the other in your format.

That means, calling -sortUsingSelector: is enough.

[theMutableArrayOfLaps sortUsingSelector:@selector(compare:)];