[iPhone] Formatting an NSDate

Question

Hi, I am pulling data from an RSS Feed. One of the keys in the feed is is a string representing the date and time the item was created.

I am trying to convert this string value to an NSDate. The string value is returned from the RSS feed as: 2009-11-18T22:08:00+00:00

I tried the following code to no avail:

    NSDateFormatter *df = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[df setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMdd HH:mm"];
NSDate *myDate = [df dateFromString: [[storedDates objectAtIndex:indexPath.row] objectForKey: @"UsersDate"]];

Ideally; on top of converting the value to a NSDate value, I would also like to format it using the localised date format on the handset.

Any pointers would be a great help.

Kind Regards

Answer 1

To retrieve the dateFormat:

NSDateFormatter *df = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[df setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ"];
NSDate *myDate = [df dateFromString: [[storedDates objectAtIndex:indexPath.row] objectForKey: @"UsersDate"]];

You can use the predefined formats if you would like to format time and date according to the user's locale:

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];
[dateFormatter setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterLongStyle];
NSLog(@"%@",[dateFormatter stringFromDate:someDate]);
[dateFormatter release]; // don't forget to release the dateformatter

Check the documentation to see which formatter suits you best.