NSDateFormatter dateFromString Always Returns nil

Question

I want to apologize ahead of time for asking a repeat question, but none of the other solutions have worked for me yet. Every time I try to pass a date string to the dateFro

Answer 1

In case anybody is stuck on the same hilarious edge case as me:

"2020-03-08T02:00:00" will return nil as long as you're in a locale that follows Daylight Savings Time, because that hour is skipped and simply doesn't exist.

Answer 2

According to NSDateFormatter documentation :

When working with fixed format dates, such as RFC 3339, you set the dateFormat property to specify a format string.

If your date format is 2017-06-16T17:18:59.082083Z then dateFormat property should look like this yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSSSSZ.

Swift 3

let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
let date = "2017-06-16T17:18:59.082083Z"
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSSSSZ"

let result = dateFormatter.date(from: date) // 2017-06-16 17:18:59 +0000

Answer 3

You're trying to use dateFromString but the Format you have passed to your Formatter is different of what you're using in dateString.

Try to use this config in your dateFormat: E',' M d',' yyyy 'at' hh:mm:ss aa z

Answer 4

There are two issues here:

1. The format of date string the formatter is expecting (@"yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss") is different from the format of the date string you're trying to parse (@"EEEE, MMMM d, yyyy 'at' h:mm:ss a zzzz").

2. Setting the formatter's locale to [NSLocale systemLocale] is causing [dateFormat dateFromString:] to return nil. Set it to [NSLocate currentLocale].

The full code for the formatter should be:

    NSDateFormatter *dateFormat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [dateFormat setTimeZone:[NSTimeZone systemTimeZone]];
    [dateFormat setLocale:[NSLocale currentLocale]];
    [dateFormat setDateFormat:@"EEEE, MMMM d, yyyy 'at' h:mm:ss a zzzz"];
    [dateFormat setFormatterBehavior:NSDateFormatterBehaviorDefault];

    NSDate *date = [dateFormat dateFromString:dateString];

Answer 5

Yet another way to get nil is if you use hh and your hours are on the 24 hr clock and > 12, in that case, you need HH (or H, for zero-padded).

That is:

• Format: yyyy-MM-DD hh:mm:ss, string: "2016-03-01 13:42:17" will return nil
• Format: yyyy-MM-DD HH:mm:ss, string: "2016-03-01 13:42:17" will return the date you expect.

Hat-tip to @neilco (see comments below his answer) for this. If you like this answer, please up-vote his, too.

Answer 6

Don't forget to escape "yyyy/MM/dd' 'HH:mm:ss" space symbols