NSDate and NSString cocoa

Question

For my iPhone app I got to convert NSDate object to string, and then convert the string back to NSDate object.. Can someone help me out? thank you!

Instead of converting the NSDate into a string and then back into an NSDate, you will probably want to keep the NSDate as it is and create an additional NSString object to represent it. — Mark Leonard, May 16 '11 at 13:43

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 16 '11 at 13:33

Use to convert from NSDate to NSString

NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[formatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss a"];
NSString *stringFromDate = [formatter stringFromDate:myNSDateInstance];

Use to convert from NSString to NSDate.

NSDateFormatter *df = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[df setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss a"];
NSDate *myDate = [df dateFromString: stringFromDate];

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 16 '11 at 13:31

1

You need to check out NSDateFormatter this does exactly this, both directions.

answered May 16 '11 at 13:31

MarkPowell

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 16 '11 at 14:38

convert NSDate to NSString

NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[formatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy"];

//Optionally for time zone converstions

[formatter setTimeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneWithName:@"..."]];

NSString *stringFromDate = [formatter stringFromDate:myNSDateInstance];

Convert NSString to NSDate

NSString *dateString = @"01-02-2010";

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];

// this is imporant - we set our input date format to match our input string
// if format doesn't match you'll get nil from your string, so be careful

[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"dd-MM-yyyy"];

NSDate *dateFromString = [[NSDate alloc] init];

// voila!
dateFromString = [dateFormatter dateFromString:dateString];

[dateFormatter release];

NSDate and NSString cocoa

3 Answers3