Another NSDateFormatter issue - ios6

Question

Having gone through the documentation, it would seem the following case should work, but the result is always nil. (This is for iOS sdk 6)
NSString *releaseDate = #"2012-10-22T00:00:00-07:00";
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
NSDate *date = nil;
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:#"yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss-ZZZZZ"];
date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:releaseDate];
NSLog(#"Result date: %#", date); // Logs "(null)"
Any insights?
Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

How about you try this. If your date string is unlocalized as I am guessing, even Apple suggests you could use something like this:
struct tm tmDate;
const char *formatString = "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z";
strptime_l(releaseDate, formatString, & tmDate, NULL);
date = [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970: mktime(& tmDate)];
NSLog(#"Result date: %#", date);
Your release date will have to be a C string though, as in const char *releaseDate = "2012-10-22T00:00:00-07:00";, which you can get also from the UTF8String method of NSString.

Answer 2

Ok. A bit of re-reading of the docs revealed my misunderstandings:
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
NSString *releaseDate = #"2012-10-22T00:00:00-07:00";
NSDate *date = nil;
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:#"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZZZZ"];
date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:releaseDate];
NSLog(#"Result date: %#", date);
NSLog(#"Result string: %#", [dateFormatter stringFromDate:date]);
The "T" had to be enclosed in apostrophes and the "ZZZZZ" for time zone already accounts for the "-" so it had to be removed.
Now it works as expected.