Swift days between two NSDates

Question

I'm wondering if there is some new and awesome possibility to get the amount of days between two NSDates in Swift / the "new" Cocoa?

E.g. like in Ruby I would do:

(end_date - start_date).to_i

Answer 1

Here is my answer for Swift 2:

func daysBetweenDates(startDate: NSDate, endDate: NSDate) -> Int
{
    let calendar = NSCalendar.currentCalendar()

    let components = calendar.components([.Day], fromDate: startDate, toDate: endDate, options: [])

    return components.day
}

Answer 2

There's hardly any Swift-specific standard library yet; just the lean basic numeric, string, and collection types.

It's perfectly possible to define such shorthands using extensions, but as far as the actual out-of-the-box APIs goes, there is no "new" Cocoa; Swift just maps directly to the same old verbose Cocoa APIs as they already exist.

Answer 3

Update for Swift 3 iOS 10 Beta 4

func daysBetweenDates(startDate: Date, endDate: Date) -> Int {
    let calendar = Calendar.current
    let components = calendar.dateComponents([Calendar.Component.day], from: startDate, to: endDate)
    return components.day!
}

Answer 4

I translated my Objective-C answer

let start = "2010-09-01"
let end = "2010-09-05"

let dateFormatter = NSDateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd"

let startDate:NSDate = dateFormatter.dateFromString(start)
let endDate:NSDate = dateFormatter.dateFromString(end)

let cal = NSCalendar.currentCalendar()


let unit:NSCalendarUnit = .Day

let components = cal.components(unit, fromDate: startDate, toDate: endDate, options: nil)


println(components)

result

<NSDateComponents: 0x10280a8a0>
     Day: 4

The hardest part was that the autocompletion insists fromDate and toDate would be NSDate?, but indeed they must be NSDate! as shown in the reference.

I don't see how a good solution with an operator would look like, as you want to specify the unit differently in each case. You could return the time interval, but than won't you gain much.

Answer 5

Here is very nice, Date extension to get difference between dates in years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds

extension Date {

    func years(sinceDate: Date) -> Int? {
        return Calendar.current.dateComponents([.year], from: sinceDate, to: self).year
    }

    func months(sinceDate: Date) -> Int? {
        return Calendar.current.dateComponents([.month], from: sinceDate, to: self).month
    }

    func days(sinceDate: Date) -> Int? {
        return Calendar.current.dateComponents([.day], from: sinceDate, to: self).day
    }

    func hours(sinceDate: Date) -> Int? {
        return Calendar.current.dateComponents([.hour], from: sinceDate, to: self).hour
    }

    func minutes(sinceDate: Date) -> Int? {
        return Calendar.current.dateComponents([.minute], from: sinceDate, to: self).minute
    }

    func seconds(sinceDate: Date) -> Int? {
        return Calendar.current.dateComponents([.second], from: sinceDate, to: self).second
    }

}

Answer 6

I see a couple Swift3 answers so I'll add my own:

public static func daysBetween(start: Date, end: Date) -> Int {
    return Calendar.current.dateComponents([.day], from: start, to: end).day!
}

The naming feels more Swifty, it's one line, and using the latest dateComponents() method.