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

To complement the version of Leo Dabus, I added support for projects written Swift and Objective-C, also added support for the optional milliseconds, probably isn't the best but you would get the point:

Xcode 8 and Swift 3

extension Date {
    struct Formatter {
        static let iso8601: DateFormatter = {
            let formatter = DateFormatter()
            formatter.calendar = Calendar(identifier: .iso8601)
            formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
            formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
            formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSXXXXX"
            return formatter
        }()
    }

    var iso8601: String {
        return Formatter.iso8601.string(from: self)
    }
}


extension String {
    var dateFromISO8601: Date? {
        var data = self
        if self.range(of: ".") == nil {
            // Case where the string doesn't contain the optional milliseconds
            data = data.replacingOccurrences(of: "Z", with: ".000000Z")
        }
        return Date.Formatter.iso8601.date(from: data)
    }
}


extension NSString {
    var dateFromISO8601: Date? {
        return (self as String).dateFromISO8601
    }
}