NSDateFormatter, am I doing something wrong or is

Question

I'm trying to print out the date in a certain format:

NSDate *today = [[NSDate alloc] init];
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmss"];
NSString *dateStr = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:today];

If the iPhone is set to 24 hour time, this works fine, if on the other hand the user has set it to 24 hour time, then back to AM/PM (it works fine until you toggle this setting) then it appends the AM/PM on the end even though I didn't ask for it:

20080927030337 PM

Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug with firmware 2.1?

Edit 1: Made description clearer

Edit 2 workaround: It turns out this is a bug, to fix it I set the AM and PM characters to "":

[dateFormatter setAMSymbol:@""];
[dateFormatter setPMSymbol:@""];

Answer 1

The reason for this behaviour is Locale, It sets the correct Locale.

Set the local of your NSDateFormatter to en_US_POSIX will fix this. It works for both 24-hour and 12 hour format.

On iPhone OS, the user can override the default AM/PM versus 24-hour time setting (via Settings > General > Date & Time > 24-Hour Time), which causes NSDateFormatter to rewrite the format string you set. From apple doc

Try this,

NSDate *today = [[NSDate alloc] init];
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setLocale:[[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"en_US_POSIX"]];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmss"];
NSString *dateStr = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:today];

Answer 2

I think this is the solution .

NSDateFormatter *df =[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
        [df setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"];
        NSLocale *usLocale = [[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"en_US"];

[df setLocale: usLocale];

[usLocale release];

 NSDate *documento_en_Linea =[[[NSDate alloc] init]autorelease];

documento_en_Linea=[df dateFromString:@"2010-07-16 21:40:33"];

[df release];

        NSLog(@"fdocumentoenLineaUTC:%@!",documento_en_Linea);


//ouput  
     fdocumentoenLineaUTC:2010-07-16 09:40:33 p.m. -0500!