I have to send date from my iPhone through my app to server, but I was surprised that the date had stored as NULL (not always) in server, that's the code used for that:
timeS = (Date().millisecondsSince1970)
// make some assertions on timeS
let date = Date(timeIntervalSince1970: timeS)
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.timeZone = TimeZone(abbreviation: "UTC")
dateFormatter.locale = NSLocale.current
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"
let dateString = dateFormatter.string(from: date)
return dateString
It seems like the c# code in the server side tried to convert the string to date and it failed, so it was stored NULL.
So recently I tried to send the date without any modifications in a string to see what happened:
self.backS.sendLocation(msg: "data fitched \(Date())")
and that's what I found in the database:
data fitched 2018-05-08 77:45:44 AM +0000
it must be:
data fitched 2018-05-08 07:45:44 AM +0000 (because that was the time for the server)
I don't know why is that happened!!
I really appreciate anybody's help, thanks in advance.
Try to get your current date and time like this in Swift.
let date = Date()
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Z"
let result = formatter.string(from: date)
self.backS.sendLocation(msg: "data fetched \(result)")
Your result will be like this.
"2018-05-12 14:34:51 +0000"
To send the date to server you should rather use Unix timestamp, instead of date in string format.
But, if you insist on a string, you should use DateFormatter. When using DateFormatter you should always set the locale property of your formatter. That ensures the formateer will return consistens results, regardless of your phone's regional settings.
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Z"
let dateString = formatter.string(from: Date())
It's important to set the locale property before you set the dateFormat property.
If you don't set the locale property, the formatter might return nil when working with 24-format on devices with 12-hour format set, and vice versa.
Source: Technical Q&A QA1480
Related
I have a string coming from API and its format will be like this
"2021-03-01T15:00:00+07:00"
so i try to convert this string to date using this code
// string to date
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZZZZ"
let date = dateFormatter.date(from: isoDate)!
print("date from date Formatter = \(date)")
// convert date back to string
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "EEEE HH:mm"
let dateString = dateFormatter.string(from: date)
print("date string \(dateString)")
return dateString
The result that I expect is -> "2021-03-01 08:00:00 +0000", "Monday 15:00"
When I try this on playground the result is what I want, but when I try this on my project the result is
-> "1478-03-01 08:00:00 +0000", "Sunday 14:42"
How can I change the result to the same as i expect? Thanks
It looks like you are using a different calendar than you expect in your project (buddhist maybe?) and I guess this is because you haven't set one explicitly so it's the one set in System Preferences.
So if you for some reason do not want to use the users current calendar (and locale and time zone) you need to set those properties on your date formatter instance
//Gregorian calendar
dateFormatter.calendar = Calendar.init(identifier: .gregorian)
//UTC time zone
dateFormatter.timeZone = TimeZone(identifier: "UTC")
//English locale
dateFormatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
This will give you the expected output.
Note that the playground is a bit inconsequent in what it uses and it seems to be a mix of what we have set in our System preferences and hardcoded values.
Hello I need to change the date format
I getting a response from backend like
dob = "1989-03-06T00:00:00Z";
in my case, I write the following code but my app is crashed i think my current date format is wrong.
func DateFromWebtoApp(_ date: String) -> String {
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'"
let date = dateFormatter.date(from: date)
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "MM-dd-yyyy"
return dateFormatter.string(from: date!)
}
Please look at the date string. There are no milliseconds (S) and the Z is a format specifier (no single quotes).
Further for an arbitrary date format add always a fixed Locale
func dateFromWebtoApp(_ dateString: String) -> String {
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ"
let date = dateFormatter.date(from: dateString)
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "MM-dd-yyyy"
return dateFormatter.string(from: date!)
}
Try this, Its work on my side.
func DateFromWebtoApp(_ date: String) -> String
{
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ"
let date = dateFormatter.date(from: date)
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "MM-dd-yyyy"
dateFormatter.timeZone = .current
return dateFormatter.string(from: date!)
}
Since that input date string is in a ISO complaint date format you can use ISO8601DateFormatter.
func dateFromWebtoApp(_ inDate: String) -> String? {
let inFormatter = ISO8601DateFormatter()
if let date = inFormatter.date(from: inDate) {
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "MM-dd-yyyy"
dateFormatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
return dateFormatter.string(from: date)
}
return nil
}
Since constructing date formatters is somewhat expensive it might be worthwhile to declare them outside of the function and keep them around if possible
Date formatters are notoriously computationally intensive to create. They’re also computationally expensive to change the dateFormat. So I’d suggest you declare two date formatter properties up front, and instantiate them once and only once.
let isoDateFormatter = ISO8601DateFormatter()
let dobFormatter: DateFormatter = {
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateStyle = .medium
formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
return formatter
}()
The first, isoDateFormatter is for converting strings from your backend into Date objects. By using ISO8601DateFormatter, it gets you out of the business of manually configuring the locale for a DateFormatter.
The second, dobFormatter is for converting the date of birth Date object into a string to be presented in your UI. For this second formatter, please note that:
I don’t use dateFormat, but rather dateStyle (so the result honors the particular device’s date localization preferences, where UK users will see “6 Mar 1989”, but US users will see “Mar 6, 2019”). Use .short rather than .medium if you really want to see dd/MM/yy for UK users and MM/dd/yy for US users. But I personally like the medium format, as it is both reasonably concise but also completely unambiguous. Of, if I have space, I use the long format, which represents date most naturally (e.g. “March 6, 2019” rather than “Mar 6, 2019”). Do whatever your UI demands.
But if this is for presentation to the end user, you really should avoid hard-coded date format strings as users want to see dates presented in a manner consistent with their personal device-wide localization settings, not what one app or the other prefers. And there’s no reason to limit your app to US users, because some day you might want to reach a broader audience.
I set the time zone for this output formatter to be GMT because this string represents a date, not a combined date/time. E.g., 1989-03-06T00:00:00Z, which is midnight on March 6, 1989 GMT, translates to is 4pm on March 5th for us in California. But when you present the birthdate, you want to say March 6th, not March 5th. In short, you want to ignore the time and timezone information. You do this by using GMT/UTC/Zulu for your output date formatter.
Anyway, you’d then use it like so:
let input = "1989-03-06T00:00:00Z"
if let dob = isoDateFormatter.date(from: input) {
let output = dobFormatter.string(from: dob)
}
so here is the string Date that I want to Convert
2019-03-22T00:00:00
and here is the problem
Remember that I used "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss" or "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss" or "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" or yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ and some other similar formats
You have to set a time zone and locale when parsing internet dates:
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss"
// necessary to avoid daylight saving (and other time shift) problems
dateFormatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: TimeZone.current.secondsFromGMT())
// necessary to avoid problems with 12h vs 24h time formatting
dateFormatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
print(dateFormatter.date(from: "2019-03-22T00:00:00"))
The default time zone contains information about daylight saving time and some specific times does not exist there. Instead, we have to use a generic time zone.
See https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1480/_index.html
22 March 2019 around midnight is the day & time when daylight saving change in Iran makes an hour non-existent.
The same can be achieved using ISO8601DateFormatter:
let dateFormatter = ISO8601DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.formatOptions = ISO8601DateFormatter.Options.withInternetDateTime.subtracting(.withTimeZone)
print(dateFormatter.date(from: "2019-03-22T00:00:00"))
Try this function might help
public func dateFormatter(strDate: String) -> String{
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "fa_IR")
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss"
let date = dateFormatter.date(from: strDate)
let dateString = dateFormatter.string(from: date!)
return dateString
}
dateFormatter.isLenient = true
Ignores missing hours during daylight saving time offset
I am new to iOS development, being an Android developer I am used to use have an object that saves a datetime with a given timezone (from Joda-Time library).
After reading the iOS documentation about dates and times (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/dates_and_times) I still have doubts about which class should I use to save datetimes. Given the Date/NSDate class description "A specific point in time, independent of any calendar or time zone." it seems very useless because it is timezone independent and time without a timezone does not make any sense, since it does not have any context.
My real problem (TL;DR):
I have a database where date times are stored in UTC like this "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss". I would like to init an object with some kind of DateFormatter (string with this format "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss") plus a timezone (UTC) to easily convert to any Timezone that I want (to show to the user on his default timezone time). How can I accomplish this in iOS?
Edit: Imagine I have a class Event with a title and a start time. Title is a String, what start time should be?
You use a DateFormatter for this.
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.calendar = Calendar(identifier: .iso8601)
formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"
formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
The formatter.locale sets the current locale for the user and formatter.dateFormat sets the desired date format. In your case yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.
To call it simply:
let utcDateFromServer = "2017-01-01 22:10:10"
let date = formatter.date(from: utcDateFromServer)
A Date is a point in time, as mentioned in other comments & in the documentation.
If you want to convert the UTC time into local time, you'll need to first convert the String "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss" from your database into a Date using DateFormatter.
let dateStringUTC = "2018-01-01 00:00:00"
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss"
//Set the input timezone (if you don't set anything, the default is user's local time)
dateFormatter.timeZone = TimeZone(abbreviation: "UTC")
let date : Date = dateFormatter.date(from: dateStringUTC)!
Then convert the Date back into String using DateFormatter with the respective TimeZone
let outputDateFormatter = DateFormatter()
outputDateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss"
//Set the output timezone (if you don't set anything, the default is user's local time)
//outputDateFormatter.timeZone = someTimeZone
let dateString = outputDateFormatter.string(from: date)
print(dateString)
Output: 2017-12-31 17:00:00
And you can just change the input and output timezone to do the opposite.
I've watching trough stack overflow to find the answer and I can't find it I want to cast this string value "1900-01-01T00:00:00" to Date format, I was trying with some formats like those:
"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"
"EEE, dd MMM yyyy hh:mm:ss +zzzz"
"YYYY-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.A"
"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.S"
but anyone of those its working.
and I want the date format like this
"dd-mm-yyyy"
Hope you can help me!
Thanks.
It is a two step process, first converting 1900-01-01T00:00:00 (known as a RFC 3999 or ISO 8601 date, referred to the specifications that define this format) into a Date object, and then converting that Date object back to a string in the form of 01-01-1900:
To convert your string in the form of 1900-01-01T00:00:00 into a Date object, you can use ISO8601DateFormatter:
let formatter = ISO8601DateFormatter()
formatter.formatOptions.remove(.withTimeZone)
let date = formatter.date(from: string)!
That is equivalent to the following DateFormat, in which one has to manually set the locale to en_US_POSIX (because RFC 3999/ISO 8601 dates use a Gregorian calendar, regardless of what the device's default calendar type) and sets the timeZone to GMT/Zulu, because usually RFC 3999/ISO 8601 dates are representing GMT unless specified otherwise:
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss"
formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
let date = formatter.date(from: string)!
For more information about the importance of timezones and locales in parsing RFC 3999 and ISO 8601 dates, see Apple's Technical Q&A 1480.
Then, to convert that Date object to a string into 01-01-1900 (day, month, and year), you'd use a format string of dd-MM-yyyy (note the uppercase MM for "month", to distinguish it from mm for "minute"):
let formatter2 = DateFormatter()
formatter2.dateFormat = "dd-MM-yyyy"
let string = formatter2.string(from: date)
Two observations regarding the dateFormat string:
If this string is for displaying to the user, you might use use dateStyle rather than dateFormat, e.g.:
formatter2.dateStyle = .short
While this will generate a slightly different format, e.g. dd/MM/yy, the virtue of this approach is that the string will be localized (e.g. UK users will see MM/dd/yyyy, their preferred way of seeing short dates).
It just depends upon the purpose of your dd-MM-yyyy format. If it's for internal purposes, go ahead and use dateFormat. But if it's for showing dates in your UI, use dateStyle instead, and enjoy the localization that DateFormatter does automatically for you. For more information, see "Working With User-Visible Representations of Dates and Times" section of the DateFormatter reference.
Note that in the absence of a timeZone specified for this second formatter, it assumes that while the ISO 8601 date was in GMT, that you want to see the date in your local timezone. For example, (1900-01-01T00:00:00 GMT was Dec 31, 1899 at 4pm in California). If you want to see the date string of the original ISO 8601 object, not corrected for timezones, you'd just set the timeZone of this second formatter to be GMT as well, e.g.
formatter2.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
As others have pointed out, you want to avoid unnecessarily re-instantiating DateFormatter objects. So you might put these formatters in properties that are instantiated only once, or use an extension:
extension DateFormatter {
static let customInputFormatter: ISO8601DateFormatter = {
let formatter = ISO8601DateFormatter()
formatter.formatOptions.remove(.withTimeZone)
return formatter
}()
static let customOutputFormatter: DateFormatter = {
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "dd-MM-yyyy"
formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0) // if you want date in your local timezone, remove this line
return formatter
}()
}
And then:
let input = "1900-01-01T00:00:00"
let date = DateFormatter.customInputFormatter.date(from: input)!
let output = DateFormatter.customOutputFormatter.string(from: date)
print(output)
This is how I do custom date formatters:
extension DateFormatter {
static let inDateFormatter: DateFormatter = {
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss"
return dateFormatter
}()
static let outDateFormatter: DateFormatter = {
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "dd-mm-yyyy"
return dateFormatter
}()
}
And then use it like:
if let date = DateFormatter.inDateFormatter.date(from: "1900-01-01T00:00:00") {
let newDateString = DateFormatter.outDateFormatter.string(from: date);
print(newDateString) //prints 01-00-1900
}
This avoids any potential performance issues and is clear at the point of use, while still being concise.
Use this extension I created, where you can pass the format as a parameter.
extension String
{
func toDate( dateFormat format : String) -> Date
{
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = format
if let date = dateFormatter.date(from: self)
{
return date
}
print("Invalid arguments ! Returning Current Date . ")
return Date()
}
}
"1900-01-01T00:00:00".toDate(dateFormat: "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss") //Plyground call test