Swift days between two NSDates

Question

I'm wondering if there is some new and awesome possibility to get the amount of days between two NSDates in Swift / the "new" Cocoa?

E.g. like in Ruby I would do:

(end_date - start_date).to_i

Answer 1

You have to consider the time difference as well. For example if you compare the dates 2015-01-01 10:00 and 2015-01-02 09:00, days between those dates will return as 0 (zero) since the difference between those dates is less than 24 hours (it's 23 hours).

If your purpose is to get the exact day number between two dates, you can work around this issue like this:

// Assuming that firstDate and secondDate are defined
// ...

let calendar = NSCalendar.currentCalendar()

// Replace the hour (time) of both dates with 00:00
let date1 = calendar.startOfDayForDate(firstDate)
let date2 = calendar.startOfDayForDate(secondDate)

let flags = NSCalendarUnit.Day
let components = calendar.components(flags, fromDate: date1, toDate: date2, options: [])

components.day  // This will return the number of day(s) between dates

Swift 3 and Swift 4 Version

let calendar = Calendar.current

// Replace the hour (time) of both dates with 00:00
let date1 = calendar.startOfDay(for: firstDate)
let date2 = calendar.startOfDay(for: secondDate)

let components = calendar.dateComponents([.day], from: date1, to: date2)