Question

Problem

I have a timestamp that I am converting to an NSDate. Now I need to extract the time. I have successfully extracted the time but the only problem I have is that if the minutes are 0, it displays “0” instead of “00”. So 11:00 would be shown as: “11:0”. Everything else works, for example 11:30 works fine.

Code

    NSDate *date = [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970:[self.program.sd intValue]];
    NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"HH:mm"];
    NSCalendar *calendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar];
    NSDateComponents *components = [calendar components:(kCFCalendarUnitHour | kCFCalendarUnitMinute) fromDate:date];
    NSInteger hour = [components hour];
    NSInteger minute = [components minute];
    NSLog(@"%d:%d", hour, minute);

Any suggestions? What have I done wrong? Is there a better way to extract both the hour and the minute at the same time rather than what I’ve done above?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Are you getting the right values back? If all you’re doing is displaying the time to the user, you should use NSDateFormatter to create a string from the date object.

NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter new] autorelease];
[formatter setDateFormat:@"hh:mm"];
NSString *timeString = [formatter stringFromDate:date];

Possibilities for format strings are documented in UTS #35: Locale Data Markup Language Appendix F: Date Format Patterns.