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?

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