Get Date from String '2011-08-16T19:03:21.000Z'

Question

I ask a database for the date of an object. I get back a string as such: 2011-08-16T19:03:21.000Z (Here's another one: 2011-08-12T02:13:16.000Z);

Edit: Here is another one that I made August 16th, 2011, at 12:51 PM for testing purposes: 2011-08-16T19:51:24.000Z

I want to convert this date to another format for display purposes. This format may change in the future, so I don't want to do direct string manipulation. The best thing to do is turn it into an NSDate, and then back to the correctly formatted string. However, I cannot, for the life of me, get the darn string into an NSDate.

- (NSString *)makeDateStringReadable:(NSString *)dateString {
    NSLog(@"The String: %@", dateString);
    NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [formatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.zzzz"];
    NSDate *theDate = [formatter dateFromString:dateString];
    NSLog(@"The Date: %@", theDate);
    [formatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"];
    NSString *finalString = [formatter stringFromDate:theDate];
    [formatter release];
    return finalString;
}

The original string is passed in, and is logged out, but the "The Date:" log always shows null. I'm assuming the format is not correct... but I can't get it to be correct. I've tried using this as a reference as well.

Can I get the aid of a DateFormatter guru? Thank you so much!

Answer 1

One problem (but possibly not the problem) is that that zzzz is not the right specification for 000Z. The end of the RFC 3339 timestamp is not a four-character timezone specification, but fractional seconds plus a literal "Z". So try changing zzzz to SSS'Z'.