How to make NSTimer show Month : Weeks : Days

Question

I'm trying to make a timer show the following - years : months : weeks : days : hours : minutes : seconds : milliseconds.

I don't want it to show the minutes until the seconds reaches 60, and the same for hours days etc. For example: If it's holding at 3 days 4 hours 39 min 3 seconds and 43 milliseconds, it shouldn't show the months or years because they would both be 0 so far.

Here is what I have.

@IBOutlet weak var timeLabel: UILabel!
var timerCount = 0
var timerRuning = false
var timer = NSTimer()

func counting() {
    timerCount++
    timeLabel.text = "\(timerCount)"
}

@IBAction func startTime(sender: UIButton)
{
    if timerRuning == false {
        timer = NSTimer.scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval(1, target: self, selector: ("counting"), userInfo: nil, repeats: true)
        timerRuning = true
    }
}

@IBAction func finishTime(sender: UIButton)
{
    if timerRuning == true {
        timer.invalidate()
        timerRuning = false
    }
}

The problem is it only shows seconds. How can I get it to show all the rest? (Like I wrote above.)

Answer 1

There is a new class NSDateComponentsFormatter introduced in iOS 8.0 which can format an amount of seconds to readable time strings.

func counting() {
  timerCount++
  let formatter = NSDateComponentsFormatter()
  formatter.unitsStyle = .Full
  timeLabel.text = formatter.stringFromTimeInterval(NSTimeInterval(timerCount))
}

But there is one restriction: It doesn't consider units less than seconds.