Parsing a RFC 822 date with NSDateFormatter

Question

I\'m using a NSDateFormatter to parse a RFC 822 date on the iPhone. However, there is no way to specify optional elements in the date format. There are a couple of optional

Answer 1

In case this is helpful to anyone else.. here is a NSDate+RFC822String.swift extension based on Simucal's answer.

It also caches the last used date format that was successful, since setting the dateFormatter.dateFormat is expensive.

import Foundation

private let dateFormatter: NSDateFormatter = {
    let dateFormatter = NSDateFormatter()
    dateFormatter.locale = NSLocale(localeIdentifier: "en_US_POSIX")
    dateFormatter.timeZone = NSTimeZone(forSecondsFromGMT: 0)

    return dateFormatter
}()

private let dateFormatsWithComma = ["EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz", "EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm zzz", "EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss", "EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm"]
private let dateFormatsWithoutComma = ["d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz", "d MMM yyyy HH:mm zzz", "d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss", "d MMM yyyy HH:mm"]

private var lastUsedDateFormatString: String?

extension NSDate {
    class func dateFromRFC822String(RFC822String: String) -> NSDate? {
        let RFC822String = RFC822String.uppercaseString

        if lastUsedDateFormatString != nil {
            if let date = dateFormatter.dateFromString(RFC822String) {
                return date
            }
        }

        if RFC822String.containsString(",") {
            for dateFormat in dateFormatsWithComma {
                dateFormatter.dateFormat = dateFormat
                if let date = dateFormatter.dateFromString(RFC822String) {
                    lastUsedDateFormatString = dateFormat
                    return date
                }
            }
        } else {
            for dateFormat in dateFormatsWithoutComma {
                dateFormatter.dateFormat = dateFormat
                if let date = dateFormatter.dateFromString(RFC822String) {
                    lastUsedDateFormatString = dateFormat
                    return date
                }
            }
        }

        return nil
    }
}