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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T06:50:03+00:00

My problem is I want to have some way to represent time (without date),

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My problem is I want to have some way to represent time (without date), like time of day in my iOS app. From a REST api I get strings like “13:12:11” which shows the time something happens, I have used NSDateFormatter to convert NSStrings to NSDates but as far as I can tell it does not accept date formats with just time components like HH:mm:ss [EDIT: you can, see below]

So my questions are
1- Is NSTimeInterval (instead of NSDate) what I should be using to store time of day?
2- How can I convert “03:04:05” to and objective-c object from one of the built in frameworks.

EDIT: You CAN use formats like “HH:mm:ss” it just replaces the date part with 2000-01-01
Still it would be very nice to have a date independent time of day representation.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    OK, thanks everybody, this is what I ended up doing: 

    NSString * timeAsString = "12:26:07";
NSDateFormatter * dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"HH:mm:ss"];
NSDate * dateZero = [dateFormatter dateFromString:@"00:00:00"];
NSDate * dc = [dateFormatter dateFromString:timeAsString];
NSTimeInterval startTime = [dc timeIntervalSinceDate:dateZero];

    It is not an elegant solution but it works, at least for what I need to do,

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