CODEWITHSUNDEEP
nsdatelocalensdateformatter
Ivan Suhinin
Ivan Suhinin

Reputation: 758

Exception parsing NSDate from NSString with explicit formatter

I've got a strange problem regarding NSDate parsing. I have a specific format of date coming from server and that's how I configure my NSDateFormatter:

self.serverDateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[self.serverDateFormatter setDateFormat:@"dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSS"];
[self.serverDateFormatter setTimeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneWithName:@"UTC"]];

Using it:

[self.serverDateFormatter dateFromString:[fields valueForKey:@"dateCreated"]];

All worked perfectly fine until build was launched on some device with some locale. My 07-05-2013 10:08:30.000 string coming from server doesn't get parsed and dateFromString returns nil.

I don't set a locale for formatter but I hoped dateFormat is enough to parse the date even without explicit locale.

Any ideas on that? Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 135

Answers (1)

prince
prince

Reputation: 924

The problem is that NSDateFormatter automatically takes device preferences such as time zones, locale, time format(12 or 24hr). In such a case, your date formatter's format will not match the incoming date from server and so date becomes nil.

Setting locale explicitly will work. Set the folowing locale for 24hr format. For 12hr you set en_US.

NSLocale *locale = [[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"en_GB"];
[dateFormatter setLocale:locale];

Best way is to make sure that you store only 24hr format in your server, if that is possible. Either make sure that you send 24hr format time to server or do a date format conversion in the server, if it is possible.

Upvotes: 0

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