What technique should I use in order to organize this list of dates?

Question

I have a list of UNIX timestamps which I convert into dates using DateFormatter. The array I have after formatting is something like this:

04-19-2017 04:50

04-19-2017 07:50

04-20-2017 14:31

04-20-2017 16:55

04-20-2017 21:08

04-21-2017 01:25

04-22-2017 05:34

I want to do this in order a table of dates without showing the same day twice, like: day - hour, hour, hour, instead of day - hour, day - hour, day - hour. Should I use dictionary to do it? Are you familiar with an easy way to do this? Thanks!

Take a DateFormatter with only date style and compare array object with each other if the new object has same date then take one string and append date first then every time if the date is same then append time only — Pankaj K., Apr 19 '17 at 08:42
do you understand you correctly that you want the day as a section header and the hours as rows? — Jon Rose, Apr 19 '17 at 08:47

CoderSulemani · Answer 1 · 2017-04-19T09:03:53.327

I don't think that's possible because the date format will get disturbed because of that and then you can't get it back to the proper date format.

But if you want a dictionary format, you could use this code:

func getDatesToDictionary(dates: [Date]) -> [String: Any] {

        let dateFormatterOne = DateFormatter()
        dateFormatterOne.dateFormat = "MM-dd-YYYY HH:mm"
        let dateFormatterTwo = DateFormatter()
        dateFormatterTwo.dateFormat = "MM-dd-YYYY"

        let fullDate = dateFormatterOne.string(from: dates[0])
        let fullDateTemp = dateFormatterTwo.date(from: fullDate)
        let finalDateString = dateFormatterTwo.string(from: fullDateTemp!)

        var dateDictionary: [String: Any] = [:]
        var dateArray: [Date] = []

        let dateFormatterThree = DateFormatter()
        dateFormatterThree.dateFormat = "HH:mm"

        for eachDate in dates {

            let fullDateHour = dateFormatterOne.string(from: eachDate)
            let finalDateHourString = dateFormatterThree.date(from: fullDateHour)
            dateArray.append(finalDateHourString!)
        }

        dateDictionary = [finalDateString: dateArray]
        return dateDictionary
    }

What technique should I use in order to organize this list of dates?

1 Answers1