How do you create a Swift Date object?
How do you create a date object from a date in swift xcode.
eg in javascript you would do:
var day = new Date('2014-05-20');
Answer
Swift has its own Date type. No need to use NSDate.
Creating a Date and Time in Swift
In Swift, dates and times are stored in a 64-bit floating point number measuring the number of seconds since the reference date of January 1, 2001 at 00:00:00 UTC. This is expressed in the Date structure. The following would give you the current date and time:
let currentDateTime = Date()
For creating other date-times, you can use one of the following methods.
Method 1
If you know the number of seconds before or after the 2001 reference date, you can use that.
let someDateTime = Date(timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate: -123456789.0) // Feb 2, 1997, 10:26 AM
Method 2
Of course, it would be easier to use things like years, months, days and hours (rather than relative seconds) to make a Date. For this you can use DateComponents to specify the components and then Calendar to create the date. The Calendar gives the Date context. Otherwise, how would it know what time zone or calendar to express it in?
// Specify date components
var dateComponents = DateComponents()
dateComponents.year = 1980
dateComponents.month = 7
dateComponents.day = 11
dateComponents.timeZone = TimeZone(abbreviation: "JST") // Japan Standard Time
dateComponents.hour = 8
dateComponents.minute = 34
// Create date from components
let userCalendar = Calendar.current // user calendar
let someDateTime = userCalendar.date(from: dateComponents)
Other time zone abbreviations can be found here. If you leave that blank, then the default is to use the user's time zone.
Method 3
The most succinct way (but not necessarily the best) could be to use DateFormatter.
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm"
let someDateTime = formatter.date(from: "2016/10/08 22:31")
The Unicode technical standards show other formats that DateFormatter supports.
Notes
See my full answer for how to display the date and time in a readable format. Also read these excellent articles: