Parsing a RFC 822 date with NSDateFormatter

Question

I\'m using a NSDateFormatter to parse a RFC 822 date on the iPhone. However, there is no way to specify optional elements in the date format. There are a couple of optional

Answer 1

Count the number of salient characters before deciding which formatter to use. For example, the two you give have different numbers of commas and spaces. If no known format matches the counts, then you known not even to try parsing it as a date.