What is the simplest way to create an NSDate with a specific value?

Question

I often need to do this to create NSDate objects to compare against in tests—to make sure a timestamp specified in millis past the Epoch UTC in a JSON file is parsed correctly, for example.

What is the correct way to do this in Objective-C with the least boilerplate?

Thanks driveby downvoter, that was really helpful! The point was not that the answer is necessarily difficult, but that the obvious answer seems to me like way too much boilerplate and whether NSDateFormatter supports ISO8601 out-of-the-box is unclear. — Robert Atkins, Jan 10 '14 at 11:21

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 10 '14 at 11:25

0

The "obvious" version is three lines:

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm"];
NSDate *date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:@"1997-07-27T09:00:00Z"];

answered Jan 10 '14 at 11:25

Robert Atkins

23,528
15
68
97

Expensive! Use `NSDateComponents` instead. – trojanfoe Jan 10 '14 at 11:26
2

If you've got a better answer, there's a button down below marked "Add Another Answer"... – Robert Atkins Jan 10 '14 at 11:28
1

It would be a duplicate, so I'll mark the question as a dupe. – trojanfoe Jan 10 '14 at 11:32
Yeah, use NSDateComponents like in the linked answer above. If you *really* want a one-liner, wrap it in a macro or in a helper function. – Peter Sarnowski Jan 10 '14 at 13:03

What is the simplest way to create an NSDate with a specific value?

1 Answers1