Making an NSDateFormatter to parse ISO dates

Question

I have a simple question but it is driving me nuts. I am using an API, and I get a JSon object back, and one of the fields is a date. The date is formatted like this: 2013-05-17T02:00:00.000Z. I cannot seem to get the NSDateformatter correct for this date. Would anyone be willing to give me a hand?

If it is not clear, I am using objective c for an iPhone app. My goal is to get a NSDate object at the end of this. Thanks again for your help.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10057456/parsing-iso-8601-with-nsdateformatter — rmaddy, May 22 '13 at 02:55
@TBlue a simple downvote would suffice, instead of the yada-yada :-) — raffian, May 22 '13 at 15:03

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 22 '13 at 02:55

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That's one of the ISO 8601 formats. Parsing it with NSDateFormatter can be tricky at best, which is why I wrote an NSFormatter subclass specifically for parsing and unparsing any ISO 8601 format.

answered May 22 '13 at 02:55

Peter Hosey

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score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

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You'll want to get the correct format for that string. Then you should be able to do something like:

NSString * dateString = jsonDict[@"dateKey"];
NSDateFormatter *df = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[df setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'"]
NSDate *date = [df dateFromString:dateString];

The T is in there to separate date from time and the Z specifies Zulu time. (https://stackoverflow.com/a/8405125/1074558)

edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

Community

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answered May 22 '13 at 02:55

atreat

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Don't forget the single-quotes to identify the T and Z as literal characters rather than special formatting characters. – Peter Hosey May 22 '13 at 02:56
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And the year should be `yyyy`, not `hhhh`. – rmaddy May 22 '13 at 03:22
And since it's Zulu time the timezone should be set to UTC. – Hot Licks May 22 '13 at 14:54

Making an NSDateFormatter to parse ISO dates

2 Answers2