Ordinal Month-day Suffix Option for NSDateFormatter setDateFormat

Question

What setDateFormat option for NSDateFormatter do I use to get a month-day's ordinal suffix?

e.g. the snippet below currently produces:
3:11 PM Saturday August 15

What must I change to get:
3:11 PM Saturday August 15**th**

NSDate *date = [NSDate date];
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease];
[dateFormatter setFormatterBehavior:NSDateFormatterBehavior10_4];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"h:mm a EEEE MMMM d"];
NSString *dateString = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:date]; 
NSLog(@"%@", dateString);

In PHP, I'd use this for the case above:
<?php echo date('h:m A l F jS') ?>

Is there an NSDateFormatter equivalent to the S option in the PHP formatting string?

Answer 1

The NSDateFormatter documentation says that all the format options it supports are listed in TR35.

Why do you want this? If you're making something for a machine to parse, you should use ISO 8601 format, or RFC 2822 format if you have to. Neither one of those requires or allows an ordinal suffix. If you're showing dates to the user, you should use one of the formats from the user's locale settings.

Answer 2

Date formatters on Mac OS 10.5 and the iPhone use TR35 as their format specifier standard. This spec doesn't allow for such a suffix on any date; if you want one, you'll have to generate it yourself.

Answer 3

If you want an idea of how to generate the suffixes for yourself, have a look at this Stack Overflow answer.

Answer 4

NSDate *date = [NSDate date];
NSDateFormatter *prefixDateFormatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease];
[prefixDateFormatter setFormatterBehavior:NSDateFormatterBehavior10_4];
[prefixDateFormatter setDateFormat:@"h:mm a EEEE MMMM d"];
NSString *prefixDateString = [prefixDateFormatter stringFromDate:date];
NSDateFormatter *monthDayFormatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease];
[monthDayFormatter setFormatterBehavior:NSDateFormatterBehavior10_4];
[monthDayFormatter setDateFormat:@"d"];  
int date_day = [[monthDayFormatter stringFromDate:date] intValue]; 
NSString *suffix_string = @"|st|nd|rd|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|st|nd|rd|th|th|th|th|th|th|th|st";
NSArray *suffixes = [suffix_string componentsSeparatedByString: @"|"];
NSString *suffix = [suffixes objectAtIndex:date_day]; 
NSString *dateString = [prefixDateString stringByAppendingString:suffix]; 
NSLog(@"%@", dateString);