Swift days between two NSDates

Question

I\'m wondering if there is some new and awesome possibility to get the amount of days between two NSDates in Swift / the \"new\" Cocoa?

E.g. like in Ruby I would do:

Answer 1

2017 version, copy and paste

func simpleIndex(ofDate: Date) -> Int {
    
    // index here just means today 0, yesterday -1, tomorrow 1 etc.
    
    let c = Calendar.current
    let todayRightNow = Date()
    
    let d = c.date(bySetting: .hour, value: 13, of: ofDate)
    let t = c.date(bySetting: .hour, value: 13, of: todayRightNow)
    
    if d == nil || today == nil {
    
        print("weird problem simpleIndex#ofDate")
        return 0
    }
    
    let r = c.dateComponents([.day], from: today!, to: d!)
    // yesterday is negative one, tomorrow is one
    
    if let o = r.value(for: .day) {
        
        return o
    }
    else {
    
        print("another weird problem simpleIndex#ofDate")
        return 0
    }
}

Answer 2

let calendar = NSCalendar.currentCalendar();
let component1 = calendar.component(.Day, fromDate: fromDate)
let component2 = calendar.component(.Day, fromDate: toDate)
let difference  = component1 - component2

Answer 3

You could use the following extension:

public extension Date {
    func daysTo(_ date: Date) -> Int? {
        let calendar = Calendar.current

        // Replace the hour (time) of both dates with 00:00
        let date1 = calendar.startOfDay(for: self)
        let date2 = calendar.startOfDay(for: date)

        let components = calendar.dateComponents([.day], from: date1, to: date2)
        return components.day  // This will return the number of day(s) between dates
    }
}

Then, you can call it like this:

startDate.daysTo(endDate)

Answer 4

I see a couple Swift3 answers so I'll add my own:

public static func daysBetween(start: Date, end: Date) -> Int {
   Calendar.current.dateComponents([.day], from: start, to: end).day!
}

The naming feels more Swifty, it's one line, and using the latest dateComponents() method.

Answer 5

There's hardly any Swift-specific standard library yet; just the lean basic numeric, string, and collection types.

It's perfectly possible to define such shorthands using extensions, but as far as the actual out-of-the-box APIs goes, there is no "new" Cocoa; Swift just maps directly to the same old verbose Cocoa APIs as they already exist.

Answer 6

All answer is good. But for Localizations we need calculates a number of decimal days in between two dates. so we can provide the sustainable decimal format.

// This method returns the fractional number of days between to dates
func getFractionalDaysBetweenDates(date1: Date, date2: Date) -> Double {

    let components = Calendar.current.dateComponents([.day, .hour], from: date1, to: date2)

    var decimalDays = Double(components.day!)
    decimalDays += Double(components.hour!) / 24.0

    return decimalDays
}