Formatting a DateTime object from .NET into a NSDate for objective-c

Question

I am working with an API that returns a .NET DateTime object into my iOS application. I'm a little confused at what's going on, the DateTime looks fine when it leaves the API, but when it comes in it goes through JSON and comes in as a string that looks like this:

/Date(1303884000000-0600)/

WTF is that and how can I turn it into a NSDate object??

Thanks!

score 12 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

12

From Parsing JSON dates on IPhone I found the following function to be perfect:

    - (NSDate*) getDateFromJSON:(NSString *)dateString
{
// Expect date in this format "/Date(1268123281843)/"
int startPos = [dateString rangeOfString:@"("].location+1;
int endPos = [dateString rangeOfString:@")"].location;
NSRange range = NSMakeRange(startPos,endPos-startPos);
unsigned long long milliseconds = [[dateString substringWithRange:range] longLongValue];
NSLog(@"%llu",milliseconds);
NSTimeInterval interval = milliseconds/1000;
return [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970:interval];
}

edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

Community

1
1

answered May 03 '11 at 19:06

Buchannon

1,671
16
28

Note that this does not handle a timezone offset. – Kristopher Johnson Mar 15 '14 at 22:46

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 29 '13 at 13:52

4

The RestKit library has an NSDateFormatter subclass for just this. Take a look here for inspiration:

https://github.com/RestKit/RestKit/blob/master/Code/Support/RKDotNetDateFormatter.h https://github.com/RestKit/RestKit/blob/master/Code/Support/RKDotNetDateFormatter.m

answered Oct 29 '13 at 13:52

Justyn

1,442
12
27

this should be the answer to the question – vishal dharankar Mar 08 '15 at 06:18

psy · Answer 3 · 2011-04-27T21:10:54.797

2

Essentially what you're getting there is milliseconds from January 1st 1970 UTC, with the -0600 being the timezone offset. Take a look at this blog post http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2008/01/18/dates-and-json.aspx

You would probably have to write a custom NSDateFormatter to handle a date in that format, or you could format it in .NET (easier), output a string in JSON, and then use a standard NSDateFormatter.

edited Apr 27 '11 at 21:10

answered Apr 27 '11 at 20:28

psy

2,791
26
26

I can't figure out why there are 3 extra zeros at the end of the string though. Using unix time converter with "1303884000000" I get the wrong date. If I get rid of the 3 zeros and convert with "1303884000" I get the right date. What are those extra zeros for (or from)?? – Buchannon Apr 27 '11 at 21:00
Oh, I guess it's milliseconds since 1970 instead of just seconds. So to parse this as a NSDate, I'd have to strip out all the characters and then compare time since 1970?? – Buchannon Apr 27 '11 at 21:07
You can do it that way. You could then add/subtract hours to adjust timezone if necessary. Like i said previously, you may want to do some more formatting on the .NET side as it's probably easier that way :) – psy Apr 27 '11 at 21:13
Ahh problem solved and a function to parse! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1757303/parsing-json-dates-on-iphone – Buchannon Apr 27 '11 at 22:06

Formatting a DateTime object from .NET into a NSDate for objective-c

3 Answers3

Linked