Question

This is a slightly tricky question. I am using NSDateFormatter on the iPhone but I wanted to only show a standard date without the years component. But retain the users locale formatting for their date.

I could easily override the formatting using

[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"h:mma EEEE MMMM d"];  // hurl.ws/43p9 (date formatting)

But now the date is in my in en-nz format eg 12:01PM Wednesday July 7. So I have totally killed the locale for any other users around the world.

I would like to say.

Give me the correct localized date for this
users region but omit the years
component.

Since the date is being displayed as string, I am tempted to just fromat the date and then remove the year component by just cutting this out of the string.

Answer 1

You could try something like:

//create a date formatter with standard locale, then:

// have to set a date style before dateFormat will give you a string back
[dateFormatter setDateStyle:NSDateFormatterMediumStyle];

// read out the format string
NSString *format = [dateFormatter dateFormat];
format = [format stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"y" withString:@""];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:format];

Kind of a hack, but it should work.

Edit: You may want to remove occurrences of the strings @"y," and @" y" first, in case you end up with some funky extra spaces or commas.