Objective-C String(yyyy-mm-dd) to NSDate

Question

My App is a JSON code which involves a date in string type. (Such as "2011-10-01"). I would like to know how I could conver it into NSDate? It needs to be displayed in a different time format such as "1 October, 2011".

ex. this code doesn't work:

   NSString *date1 = @"2010-11-12";
    NSDateFormatter *dateFormat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [dateFormat setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MMMM-dd"];
    NSDate *date2 = [dateFormat dateFromString:date1];
    NSString *strdate = [dateFormat stringFromDate:date2];

Answer 1

Use NSDateFormatter. The appropriate method is dateFromString:. Take a look at the documentation :)

Answer 2

As Tug writes in his blog post on the subject:

Objective-C and iOS SDK provide a class to help formatting date (marshaling and unmarshaling), this class is NSDateFormatter. No surprise, the NSDateFormatter uses the Unicode Date Format Patterns.

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc]init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"];
NSDate *date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:publicationDate ];
[dateFormatter release];

where publicationDate in this case is an NSString.

Answer 3

You can try this

NSDateFormatter *df = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease];

[df setDateFormat:@"dd MM yyyy"];    

NSString *todayString = [df stringFromDate:[NSDate date]];

NSDate *someDate=[NSDate date];

NSString *targetDateString = [df stringFromDate:someDate];

NSLog(@"date:%@",targetDateString);