how to check if time is within a specific range in swift

Question

Hi I am trying to check if the current time is within a time range, say 8:00 - 16:30. My code below shows that I can obtain the current time as a string, but I am unsure how

Answer 1

You can get year, month, and day from today's date, append those to those date time strings to build new Date objects. Then compare the todaysDate to those two resulting Date objects:

let todaysDate  = Date()
let startString = "8:00"
let endString   = "16:30"

// convert strings to `Date` objects

let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "HH:mm"
let startTime = formatter.date(from: startString)
let endTime = formatter.date(from: endString)

// extract hour and minute from those `Date` objects

let calendar = Calendar.current

var startComponents = calendar.dateComponents([.hour, .minute], from: startTime!)
var endComponents = calendar.dateComponents([.hour, .minute], from: endTime!)

// extract day, month, and year from `todaysDate`

let nowComponents = calendar.dateComponents([.month, .day, .year], from: todaysDate)

// adjust the components to use the same date

startComponents.year  = nowComponents.year
startComponents.month = nowComponents.month
startComponents.day   = nowComponents.day

endComponents.year  = nowComponents.year
endComponents.month = nowComponents.month
endComponents.day   = nowComponents.day

// combine hour/min from date strings with day/month/year of `todaysDate`

guard
    let startDate = calendar.date(from: startComponents),
    let endDate = calendar.date(from: endComponents)
else {
    print("unable to create dates")
    return
}

// now we can see if today's date is inbetween these two resulting `NSDate` objects

let isInRange = todaysDate > startDate && todaysDate < endDate

See previous revision of this answer for Swift 2 answer.