Question

I’ve created a category to help me deal with creating dates from year, month, day fields. I now also have the need to create a date from a Julian Date (YYJJJ). I’ve parsed my Julian date string and now have

int years  // representing the year parsed from the julian date string
int days  // representing the day of the year parsed from julian date string

here is my NSDateCategory:

    #import "NSDateCategory.h"


    @implementation NSDate (MBDateCat)

    + (NSDate *)dateWithYear:(NSInteger)year month:(NSInteger)month day:(NSInteger)day {
        NSCalendar *calendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar];
        NSDateComponents *components = [[[NSDateComponents alloc] init] autorelease];
        [components setYear:year];
        [components setMonth:month];
        [components setDay:day];
        return [calendar dateFromComponents:components];
    }
  @end

How do I create an NSDate from these fields?

Edit:
Here is the functionality in Java that I am trying to translate into Objective-C

// Julian Exp Date
                // (YYJJJ)
                Date dt = new Date();
                Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
                cal.setTime(dt);
                int years = new Integer(mid(data, 0, 2)).intValue();
                int days = new Integer(mid(data, 2, 3)).intValue();

                int year = ((cal.get(Calendar.YEAR) / 20) * 20) + years;
                int month = 0;
                int day = 0;
                cal.set(year, month, day);
                cal.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR, days);
                myData.setDate(cal);

Answer 1

Use NSDateFormatter, given the right format string it achieves what you want:

NSString *dateString = @"10123";      // 123. day of 2010
NSDateFormatter *fmt = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[fmt setDateFormat:@"yyDDD"];
NSDate *aDate = [fmt dateFromString:dateString];
[fmt release];
NSLog(@"Date: %@", aDate);

This returns:

Date: 2010-05-03 00:00:00 +0200