dateFormat’s One Big Mistake

Your location. Your timeZone.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

This article will cover the big issue with dateFormatter, and how you might overcome it. Be aware that I’ve coded everything within this article in Swift using Playgrounds.

No Problem: Creating a Date

let now: Date = Date()

No obvious problem: Displaying a date

let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-mm-dd"
let dateString = dateFormatter.string(from: now)
print (dateString)

Now since today is Sunday 3rd May 2020, on my machine I print to the console:

2020-56-03

Have you seen the problem in what I’ve written above?

The problem

dateFormatter is not locale aware, and this means that the user can potentially change this (like their region) from their device.

Solution number one:

Force the locale to be the region you want (for example, if you wear a cowboy hat the US).

let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US")
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-mm-dd"
dateFormatter.timeZone = TimeZone(identifier: "Europe/London")
let dateString = dateFormatter.string(from…