NSDateFormatter based on the time settings of iPhone

Question

I have the NSDateFormatter for displaying time as h:mm to display time as 7:50 PM for example.

It works fine for phones with time showing as 5:55 PM etc. but there are phones in different countries with time showing on the Status Bar as 05:55 PM and with that setting the NSDateTimeFormatter with h:mm seem to return (null).

Are there any workarounds or is there a best way to handle these situations? I was thinking off to check for nil and then retry NSDateFormatter with hh:mm but that sounds ugly to me. I wanted to make sure I do it right.

Answer 1

I finally got this to work by converting every date and time using the "en_US_POSIX" locale. I know, it's not truly what I want but it works across different region and time formats. I still have to figure out how to express these dates and times purely based on the user's region and time formats. Maybe, for another day.

Answer 2

[dateFormatter setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterShortStyle];

NSLog(@"%@", [dateFormatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]]);

For language German and region format Germany, it logs 01:46, while for English and United States it logs 1:46 AM. And I checked: it will print 13:52 and 1:52 PM correctly for times after noon.