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iOS

Posted by Patrik Alam
Patrik Alam
2,332 Points

need help on code challenge Formatting Dates with NSDateFormatter

Instructions says: Create a date format using the given 'dateFormatter' variable to display any date with the format of '02/29/2012'. Don't worry about using it for now, just set up the formatter.

I put down

dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init]; [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"MM/DD/YYYY"];

Can anyone help me correct this? Thanks

2 Answers

David Kaneshiro Jr.
David Kaneshiro Jr.
29,247 Points
David Kaneshiro Jr.
David Kaneshiro Jr.
29,247 Points

Patrik Alam,

I believe the error is within your date format string, @"MM/DD/YYYY". You have to be careful to put the appropriate lower case or upper case letters to represent the date pattern. In your current date pattern if you ran it through Xcode it would return, 08/228/2013, for today's date (8/16/2013).

The MM will return 08 for the month of August, which is what we want.

The DD will return the "day of the year", not the date which is 16.

And according to the link below an uppercase Y will return the year for "week of the year" calendars. I'm not sure what that means but if you ran your code through Xcode it will return 2013. I think the safer year representation for your pattern would be to use the lower case 'y' instead.

So the correct pattern for the date would look like @"MM/dd/yyyy".

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-25.html#Date_Format_Patterns

I hope this helps.

Patrik Alam
Patrik Alam
2,332 Points

Thanks so much David!

David Kaneshiro Jr.
David Kaneshiro Jr.
29,247 Points

You're welcome.

Joel Clipperton
Joel Clipperton
1,532 Points
Joel Clipperton
Joel Clipperton
1,532 Points

...moved...