Why isn't my time zone being saved into my NSDate?

Question

I must initialize an NSDate object from NSString in objective-c. I do it like this:

NSString *dateString = [[webSentence child:@"DateTime"].text stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"T" withString:@" "];
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-mm-dd HH:mm:ss"];
[dateFormatter setTimeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneWithName:@"Europe/Budapest"]];

NSDate *date = [[NSDate alloc] init];
date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:dateString];

E.g: when I try it with string value @"2011-01-02 17:49:54" I get an NSDate 2011-01-02 16:49:54 +0000. As you can see there is a one hour difference between the two values. NSDate has a wrong value, it should be exactly the same I defined in my string in the timezone I set in dateFormatter. It seems it uses my date defined it string as UTC, even if I set its timezone to "Europe/Budapest". How can I fix this problem?

Thanks!

Answer 1

NSDate stores dates relative to a standard reference date. From the class docs:

"The sole primitive method of NSDate, timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate, provides the basis for all the other methods in the NSDate interface. This method returns a time value relative to an absolute reference date—the first instant of 1 January 2001, GMT."

NSDate does not itself have any concept of time zones. So the NSDateFormatter did the right thing: it converted a date which you told it had a GMT offset (by specifying a time zone), and gave you a "normalized" NSDate for that date.

If you want to see the date represented in the Europe/Budapest time zone, either use your existing date formatter (-stringFromDate:) or the appropriate NSDate description method (e.g. -descriptionWithCalendarFormat:timeZone:locale:).

P.S.- You don't need an alloc/init at all in your code as written. In non-ARC that would be a leak.

P.P.S.- Your date format is incorrect and giving nonsensical results. I've gone ahead and cleaned up your code as follows (tested under ARC):

NSString *dateString = @"2011-09-02 17:49:54";
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
NSTimeZone *tz = [NSTimeZone timeZoneWithName:@"Europe/Budapest"];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"];
[dateFormatter setTimeZone:tz];

NSDate *date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:dateString];
NSLog(@"%@", [dateFormatter stringFromDate:date]);
NSLog(@"%@", [date descriptionWithCalendarFormat:nil timeZone:tz locale:nil]);