R – Date Formatters in NSDateFormatter

NSString *yourXMLDate = @"2009-08-10T16:03:03Z" 
NSDateFormatter *inputFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[inputFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss"];
NSDate *inputDate = [inputFormatter dateFromString:yourXMLDate];
NSDateFormatter *outputFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[outputFormatter setDateFormat:@"MMM dd, HH:mm a"];
NSString *outputDate = [outputFormatter stringFromDate:inputDate];

Hope this helps!

Duh!!

Sometimes you have an "Aha!!" moment, sometimes it's more of a "Duh!!" This is the latter. In the category for initWithSafeLocale the "super" init was coded as self = [super init];. This inits the SUPERCLASS of NSDateFormatter but does not init the NSDateFormatter object itself.

Apparently when this initialization is skipped, setLocale "bounces off", presumably because of some missing data structure in the object. Changing the init to self = [self init]; causes the NSDateFormatter initialization to occur, and setLocale is happy again.

Here is the "final" source for the category's .m:

#import "NSDateFormatter+Locale.h"

@implementation NSDateFormatter (Locale)

- (id)initWithSafeLocale {
    static NSLocale* en_US_POSIX = nil;
    self = [self init];
    if (en_US_POSIX == nil) {
        en_US_POSIX = [[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"en_US_POSIX"];
    }
    [self setLocale:en_US_POSIX];
    return self;    
}

@end