Get UTC time and local time from NSDate object

Question

In objective-c, the following code results in the UTC date time information using the date API.

NSDate *currentUTCDate = [NSDate date]
         


        

Answer 1

Xcode 9 • Swift 4 (also works Swift 3.x)

extension Formatter {
    // create static date formatters for your date representations
    static let preciseLocalTime: DateFormatter = {
        let formatter = DateFormatter()
        formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
        formatter.dateFormat = "HH:mm:ss.SSS"
        return formatter
    }()
    static let preciseGMTTime: DateFormatter = {
        let formatter = DateFormatter()
        formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
        formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
        formatter.dateFormat = "HH:mm:ss.SSS"
        return formatter
    }()
}

---

extension Date {
    // you can create a read-only computed property to return just the nanoseconds from your date time
    var nanosecond: Int { return Calendar.current.component(.nanosecond,  from: self)   }
    // the same for your local time
    var preciseLocalTime: String {
        return Formatter.preciseLocalTime.string(for: self) ?? ""
    }
    // or GMT time
    var preciseGMTTime: String {
        return Formatter.preciseGMTTime.string(for: self) ?? ""
    }
}

---

Playground testing

Date().preciseLocalTime // "09:13:17.385"  GMT-3
Date().preciseGMTTime   // "12:13:17.386"  GMT
Date().nanosecond       // 386268973

This might help you also formatting your dates: