使用NSDateFormatter将NSString解析为NSDate

Question

I have such string: "Tue, 22 Oct 2013 1:59 pm EEST" i am trying to set these parsing rules:

[formatter setDateFormat: @"EEE, dd MMM yyyy hh:mm a z"];

but this returns nil when i perform:

[formatter dateFromString: @"Tue, 22 Oct 2013 1:59 pm EEST"];

What's the right regular expression for such format?

Answer 1

 NSLocale *locale = [[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"en_GB"];
    NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [formatter setDateFormat:@"EEE, dd MMM yyyy hh:mm a zzz"];
    [formatter setLocale:locale];
    NSDate* date = [formatter dateFromString:@"Tue, 22 Oct 2013 1:59 PM EEST"];
    NSLog(@"date: %@",date);

O/P:-date: 2013-10-22 10:59:00 +0000

Answer 2

hh is a padded hour ("01" in your case) but your string doesn't have padded hours (just "1" ) so it should be just h instead.

You can see a practical examples of the different formatting components below (output from this GitHub gist ). The date being formatted is 1987-08-27 15:24:03

format  result
--------------
    yy  87
  yyyy  1987
     M  8
    MM  08
   MMM  Aug
  MMMM  August
    dd  27
    HH  15
    hh  03    // <--.
     h  3     // <--'--- note the difference
     a  PM
    mm  24
     m  24
    ss  03
     s  3