NSDate between two given NSDates

Question

I am interested in creating a method to find if the current date falls between certain times on any given day. It is for a scheduling program, so I want to find what event i

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this would be to use -timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate to turn each of your dates into an NSTimeInterval typed value, which is really just a double.

NSTimeInterval rightNow = [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];

From there, determining if a date is in between any given two dates is just a matter of simple numeric comparisons.

If you need to convert from a string representation of a date to an NSDate instance to then retrieve a time interval, use NSDateFormatter.

If you need to create a date from known date components, use NSCalendar. (i.e. you know the year is 2010, the month is 4 and the day is 12, you can use NSCalendar's components to generate an NSDate instance via the -dateFromComponents: method.).

As Ben indicated, NSCalendar's component interface can also be used to suss out the hour & minute to determine if it is in a range (which would seemingly be an atypical usage in that most events don't happen every day at the same time... but... sure... there are reasons to do that, too!)