iphone shortdate with 4 digit year

Question

I am sure I am just missing something. But I have googled this for days trying to find how to show a 4 digit year when displaying an NSDate with a style of NSDateFormatterShortStyle. Please let me know if you have a solution. Here is the code I am using now.

[NSDateFormatter setDefaultFormatterBehavior:NSDateFormatterBehavior10_4];
 NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease ];
 [dateFormatter setDateStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];
 [dateFormatter setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterNoStyle];

 // add label for birth
 UILabel *birthday = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(125, 10, 100, 25)];
 birthday.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentRight;
 birthday.tag = kLabelTag;
 birthday.font = [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:14];
 birthday.textColor = [UIColor grayColor];
 birthday.text = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:p.Birth];

Answer 1

kCFDateFormatterShortStyle Specifies a short style, typically numeric only, such as “11/23/37” or “3:30pm”.

Available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later.

Declared in CFDateFormatter.h.

Source

NSDateFormatterShortStyle doesn't appear to give you 4 digit years.

Answer 2

If you need four digit years, set the dateformat: using the exact format you'd like. The downside is you lose automatic locale formatting.

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"MM/dd/yyyy"];

...

birthday.text = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:p.Birth];

If you need localization then you could try modifying the date format of the sort style.

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease ];
[dateFormatter setDateStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];
[dateFormatter setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterNoStyle];
NSString *fourDigitYearFormat = [[dateFormatter dateFormat] stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"yy" withString:"yyyy"]
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:fourDigitYearFormat];