Parsing unsupported date formats in via Cocoa's NSDate

Question

With the Cocoa framework how can I parse @"2008-12-29T00:27:42-08:00" into an NSDate object? The standard -dateWithString: doesn't like it.

Answer 1

If you only need to handle the ISO 8601 format (of which that string is an example), you might try my ISO 8601 parser and unparser.

Answer 2

You'll need to look at NS**Calendar**Date's initWithString:calendarFormat: to handle custom date strings. Look at page 16 and 17 of this document to find the correct format specifiers.

Answer 3

You can use NSDateFormatter to parse dates:

    NSDateFormatter* dateFormatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease];
    [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ"];
    date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:dateStr];

The unicode date format patterns defines the format string you can use with the setDateFormat: method.

Note that if you're targeting 10.4 then you need to call: [dateFromatter setFormatterBehavior:NSDateFormatterBehavior10_4];. Not needed for iphone, or leopard as this mode is the default there.