Working with dates is hard, there is no doubt about that. And formatting dates properly for every user of your app is no easier (if you want to do everything manually). Luckily, the system can help us.
For example, in the US one would write "October 15" while in The Netherlands we write 15 oktober.
Note that the order of the date and the month is different, the spelling of the month is different and the capitalization is different too.
The DateFormatter in iOS will handle a lot of this for you. For example, if you'd use the following code on a device that uses nl
as its locale you would see the output that I added to this snippet as a comment:
let now = Date()
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "dd MMMM"
formatter.string(from: now) // 15 oktober
The output of this code is spot on. Exactly what we need and it matches the specified date format perfectly. If you'd run the same code on a device that uses en_us
as its locale the output would be 15 October.
The date formatter got the spelling and capitalization right but the date and month are in the wrong order.
You can fix this by using setLocalizedDateFormatFromTemplate
on your date formatter instead of assigning its dateFormat
directly. Let's look at an example that runs on a device with nl
as its locale again:
let now = Date()
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.setLocalizedDateFormatFromTemplate("dd MMMM")
formatter.string(from: now) // 15 oktober
That still works, perfect. If you'd run this code on an en_us
device the output would be October 15. Exactly what we need.
If you want to play around with setLocalizedDateFormatFromTemplate
in a Playground you can give it a go with the following code that uses a date formatter in different locales:
import Foundation
let now = Date()
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_us")
formatter.setLocalizedDateFormatFromTemplate("dd MMMM")
formatter.string(from: now) // October 15
formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "nl")
formatter.setLocalizedDateFormatFromTemplate("dd MMMM")
formatter.string(from: now) // 15 oktober
If you have questions about this Quick Tip, or if you want to reach out to me for other reasons then don't hesitate to send me a message on Twitter.
It's a good thing that Swift and Foundation can handle these kinds of
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