Need to convert custom timestamp to different format in Objective-C iOS

Question

I have a string "2012-06-04" and am having a hard time converting it to: June 4, 2012.

Is there a quick way to transform this? I come from a ruby world where you would convert everything to seconds and that back out to the format you need it. Is there a reference that shows how to do that?

Thanks

Answer 1

One way to do so is to convert the string to an NSDate using the NSDateFormatter with the 2012-06-04 format, and then convert the NSDate back to a string using the June 4, 2012 format:

NSString* input = @"2012-06-04";

NSDateFormatter* df = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[df setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"];
NSDate* date = [df dateFromString:input];
[df setDateFormat:@"MMMM d, yyyy"];

return [df stringFromDate:date];

The format string's syntax is described in UTS #35.