Question

My core data entity has a date field which I can output to a UITableViewCell and it outputs like this:

What I’d like to do is change this date format so that it is a bit more human readable, e.g. to

Friday 19th October 14:44

or

19/10/2012 14:44

How do I do this in Objective-C? I imagine there’s a formatter class for NSDate but how do I convert the pulled core data string to an NSDate?

Answer 1

None of the above answers worked, even when I tried to cast the core data object to a NSDate it still wouldn’t perform the cast. I ended up doing this:

// Make a date formatter which corresponds exactly with the format of the date in core data
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Z"];

// Get the date from core data
NSString *dateStr = [[object valueForKey:@"date"] description];

// Parse from string to date
NSDate *date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:dateStr ];

// Set the date formatter to the format that I actually want
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"dd/MM/yy HH:mm"];

// Set the text on the date label
cell.dateLabel.text = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:date];