How can I parse / create a date time stamp formatted with fractional seconds UTC timezone (ISO 8601, RFC 3339) in Swift?

Question

How to generate a date time stamp, using the format standards for ISO 8601 and RFC 3339?

The goal is a string that looks like this:

\"2015-01-01T00:0         


        

Answer 1

If you want to use the ISO8601DateFormatter() with a date from a Rails 4+ JSON feed (and don't need millis of course), you need to set a few options on the formatter for it to work right otherwise the the date(from: string) function will return nil. Here's what I'm using:

extension Date {
    init(dateString:String) {
        self = Date.iso8601Formatter.date(from: dateString)!
    }

    static let iso8601Formatter: ISO8601DateFormatter = {
        let formatter = ISO8601DateFormatter()
        formatter.formatOptions = [.withFullDate,
                                          .withTime,
                                          .withDashSeparatorInDate,
                                          .withColonSeparatorInTime]
        return formatter
    }()
}

Here's the result of using the options verses not in a playground screenshot: