Formatting a date to be fixed-width without zero-padding - ios

Question

I have a UITableView, in which each row displays a date and time plus a message (screenshot below). I'm using a single attributed string to display the text in the row (which is necessary for the color difference).
Because I don't want to zero-pad the month, day, or hour, the date on the left-hand side of the colon is variable length, which causes the list of messages to look disorganized.
The result I want is for all the colons to line up vertically, so that the messages line up, despite the number of characters in the date being variable. What's the best way to accomplish this?
I've tried essentially space-padding (by detecting the length of the month, day, and hour), but the result still doesn't line up perfectly and can result in long (ugly looking) blocks of whitespace when all three (month, date, and hour) need to be padded. Perhaps there is a way to distribute this extra space amongst all the characters evenly?
Date formatting:
//choose format for the date
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "M/d h:mma: "
dateFormatter.amSymbol = "am"
dateFormatter.pmSymbol = "pm"
Entering into the view:
//first put in the date
let classHistoryCellText = NSMutableAttributedString.init(string: formattedDate)
classHistoryCellText.addAttribute(NSForegroundColorAttributeName, value: UIColor.init(hex: "#00000", alpha: 0.3), range: NSMakeRange(0, lengthOfDate))
//append what the message is
classHistoryCellText.append(NSMutableAttributedString.init(string: classBeingViewed.classHistory[indexPath.row]["event"] as! String))
classHistoryCellText.addAttribute(NSForegroundColorAttributeName, value: UIColor.init(hex: "#00000"), range: NSMakeRange(lengthOfDate, classHistoryCellText.length - lengthOfDate))
//bold the entire thing and make it size fontSize
classHistoryCellText.addAttribute(NSFontAttributeName, value: UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: fontSize), range: NSMakeRange(0, classHistoryCellText.length))
classHistoryCellToDisplay.textLabel?.attributedText = classHistoryCellText
Result:

Answer 1

Try changing your date formatter to:
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "MM/dd hh:mma: " // this line is changed
dateFormatter.amSymbol = "am"
dateFormatter.pmSymbol = "pm"
It will make months, days and hours to always have two digits which will make all your dates the same width.
This will work unless you have a specific requirement to avoid displaying leading zeros. If this is the case, the easiest solution is to use two labels - one for date and one for status. Make date label a fixed width.