How to convert arabic date to english date

Question

I have a problem in my application. I am getting a date in this format :

"الإثنين 2015.5.5 - 16:16 مساء بتوقيت ابوظبي"

Like this below Image-

From an API but I want to convert it to the NSDate English format.

I found this code by @dfri. It converts from English to Arabic but I don't know my API dateFormat.

// input date in given format (as string)
let inputDateAsString = "2016-03-09 10:33:59"

// initialize formatter and set input date format
var formatter = NSDateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"

// read input date string as NSDate instance
if let date = formatter.dateFromString(inputDateAsString) {

    // set locale to "ar_DZ" and format as per your specifications
    formatter.locale = NSLocale(localeIdentifier: "ar_DZ")
    formatter.dateFormat = "EEEE, d, MMMM, yyyy HH:mm a"
    let outputDate = formatter.stringFromDate(date)

    print(outputDate) // الأربعاء, 9 مارس, 2016 10:33 ص
}

How can I do this?

Answer 1

For an easier conversion I think it's better to remove the additional text so I filtered the string and kept only the needed numbers

here is my attempt:

var dateString = "الإثنين 2015.5.5 - 16:16 مساء  بتوقيت ابوظبي"

dateString = dateString.trimmingCharacters(in: CharacterSet(charactersIn: "01234567890.-:").inverted)

var formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy.MM.dd - HH:mm"

let date = formatter.date(from: dateString)

print(date)

//"May 5, 2015 at 4:16 PM"