Converting Adobe PDF date String to NSDate

Question

The input string is '20100908041312'

the format is year,month,day,Hours,minutes,seconds,time zone

and I have ben trying to convert it to an NSDate with this: @"yyyyMMddHHmmsszz"

But NSDate is nil, anyone see what I'm doing wrong?

-(NSDate*)convertPDFDateStringAsDate:(NSString*) _string{

    //20100908041312
    //year month day Hours minutes seconds and time zone

    NSDateFormatter *dateFormat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [dateFormat setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmsszz"]; 
    NSDate *date = [dateFormat dateFromString:_string];
    //date is nil...
    [dateFormat release];

    return date;
}

EDIT: its the time zone breaking it

EDIT2: @"yyyyMMddHHmmssTZD" stops it returning nil, but dosnt pick the time zone correctly

EDIT3: This was the code I Used in the end...i found that the format changes from PDF to PDF so the code deals with the variations that i Found, in some cases this wont extract the Time Zone Properly.

-(NSDate*)convertPDFDateStringAsDate:(NSString*) _string{

    NSDateFormatter *dateFormat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];

    NSString * formatCheck = [_string substringToIndex:2];

    if(![formatCheck isEqualToString:@"D:"])
    {
        NSLog(@"ERROR: Date String wasnt in expected format");
        return nil;//return [NSDate date];
    }

    NSString * extract = [_string substringFromIndex:2];    

    //NSLog(@"DATESTRING:'%@'",extract);NSLog(@"DATELENGTH:%i",[extract length]);

    if([extract length]>14)
    {
        [dateFormat setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmssTZD"];
    }
    else 
    {
        [dateFormat setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmss"];
    }   
    NSDate * date = [dateFormat dateFromString:extract]; 
    [dateFormat release];

    return date ;
}

Alex Alex · Accepted Answer · 2010-11-29T12:03:39

It should follow the unicode standard for the setDateFormat: http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-6.html#Date_Format_Patterns

You should be able to set the timezone this way:

NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[formatter setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmss"];
//Optionally for time zone conversations
[formatter setTimeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneWithName:@"..."]];

Alex

Converting Adobe PDF date String to NSDate

3 Answers