How do I get hour and minutes from NSDate?

Question

In my application I need to get the hour and minute separately:

NSString *currentHour=[string1 substringWithRange: NSMakeRange(0,2)];
        int currentHourInNumber=[currentHour intValue];

Consider string1 contains 11:59:13 AM which is coming from datepicker.

Here if I use above code, it's okay to get hour if it's greater than 9. Else I need to change NSMakeRange(0,1) to get hour between 1 to 9.

Are there any methods to get the hour, minutes, etc?

Thanks in advance, please provide me sample code.

Answer 1

Use an NSDateFormatter to convert string1 into an NSDate, then get the required NSDateComponents:

Obj-C:

NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"<your date format goes here"];
NSDate *date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:string1];
NSCalendar *calendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar];
NSDateComponents *components = [calendar components:(NSCalendarUnitHour | NSCalendarUnitMinute) fromDate:date];
NSInteger hour = [components hour];
NSInteger minute = [components minute];

Swift 1 and 2:

let dateFormatter = NSDateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "Your date Format"
let date = dateFormatter.dateFromString(string1)
let calendar = NSCalendar.currentCalendar()
let comp = calendar.components([.Hour, .Minute], fromDate: date)
let hour = comp.hour
let minute = comp.minute

Swift 3:

let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "Your date Format"
let date = dateFormatter.date(from: string1)
let calendar = Calendar.current
let comp = calendar.dateComponents([.hour, .minute], from: date)
let hour = comp.hour
let minute = comp.minute

More about the dateformat is on the official unicode site

Answer 2

If you only need it for presenting as a string the following code is much easier

NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[formatter setDateFormat:@"HH:mm"];

NSString *startTimeString = [formatter stringFromDate:startTimePicker.date];

Answer 3

This seems to me to be what the question is after, no need for formatters:

NSDate *date = [NSDate date];
NSCalendar *calendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar];
NSDateComponents *components = [calendar components:(NSCalendarUnitHour | NSCalendarUnitMinute) fromDate:date];
NSInteger hour = [components hour];
NSInteger minute = [components minute];

Answer 4

NSDateComponents

All you need can be found here:
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/DatesAndTimes/Articles/dtCalendars.html

Answer 5

If you were to use the C library then this could be done:

time_t t;
struct tm * timeinfo;

time (&t);
timeinfo = localtime (&t);

NSLog(@"Hour: %d Minutes: %d", timeinfo->tm_hour, timeinfo->tm_min);

And using Swift:

var t = time_t()
time(&t)
let x = localtime(&t)

println("Hour: \(x.memory.tm_hour) Minutes: \(x.memory.tm_min)")

For further guidance see: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/localtime/

Answer 6

With iOS 8, Apple introduced a helper method to retrieve the hour, minute, second and nanosecond from an NSDate object.

Objective-C

NSDate *date = [NSDate currentDate];
NSInteger hour = 0;
NSInteger minute = 0;
NSCalendar *currentCalendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar];
[currentCalendar getHour:&hour minute:&minute second:NULL nanosecond:NULL fromDate:date];
NSLog(@"the hour is %ld and minute is %ld", (long)hour, (long)minute);

Swift

let date = NSDate()
var hour = 0
var minute = 0
let calendar = NSCalendar.currentCalendar()
if #available(iOS 8.0, *) {
    calendar.getHour(&hour, minute: &minute, second: nil, nanosecond: nil, fromDate: date)
    print("the hour is \(hour) and minute is \(minute)")
}

Answer 7

Swift 2.0

You can do following thing to get hours and minute from a date :

let dateFromat = NSDateFormatter()
dateFromat.dateFormat = "hh:mm a"
let date = dateFromat.dateFromString(string1) // In your case its string1
print(date) // you will get - 11:59 AM

Answer 8

Swift 2.0

    let dateNow = NSDate()
    let calendar = NSCalendar.currentCalendar()
    let hour = calendar.component(NSCalendarUnit.Hour, fromDate: dateNow)
    let minute = calendar.component(NSCalendarUnit.Minute, fromDate: dateNow)
    print(String(hour))
    print(String(minute))

Please do take note of the cast to String in the print statement, you can easily assign that value to variables, like this:

var hoursString = String(hour)
var minutesString = String(minute)

Then you can concatenate values like this:

var compoundString = "\(hour):\(minute)"
print(compoundString)