I want to format a date into a string, but its giving me nil, i want to use the date in a UITextField.text - swift

Question

// the creationdate is coming from an api call
var creationDate = "2020-11-04T16:46:59.439212Z"
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateStyle = .long
formatter.timeStyle = .none
formatter.dateFormat = "dd-MM-yyyy"
var creationDateFormattedInToDate = formatter.date(from:
creationDate)
print("date \(creationDateFormattedInToDate)")
So i want that date in the format 04-11-2020 and pass in a UITextField.text

Answer 1

You will need two formatters, one to parse the input date to a Date object and one to convert the date object to a string of the right format.
The input date seems to be a variant of a internet date/time so we use a ISO8601DateFormatter
let formatter = ISO8601DateFormatter()
formatter.formatOptions = [.withInternetDateTime, .withFractionalSeconds]
The second formatter is a basic DateFormatter with a custom format
let outputFormatter = DateFormatter()
outputFormatter.dateFormat = "dd-MM-yyyy"
And then we can use them like this
if let date = formatter.date(from: creationDate) {
someTextField.text = outputFormatter.string(from: date)
}

Answer 2

You will want to use one formatter for parsing the response from the server (which is in what’s called and “ISO 8601” or “RFC 3339” format), and another for preparing the string representation of the date in the UI.
Regarding the date formatter for parsing the server response:
Set the formatter’s locale to Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX").
The setting of the styles when parsing this date string are irrelevant if you’re going to set dateFormat.
When parsing the date from the string, set dateFormat to yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSSSSX.
If you ever plan on using this formatter for the reverse date-to-string conversion (for preparing date strings to be sent to the server) you might want to set the timeZone of the formatter to TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0).
Regarding the date formatter used to prepare the string representation of the date in your UI:
I would not advise ever using a fixed dd-MM-yyyy format in your UI. That might be natural for European users, but it may be unnatural to most US users, who generally expect to see month before the day.
I would suggest not using dateFormat for this second date formatter, but rather using a dateStyle (e.g. of .medium or .long). It results in a nice, localized, and natural reading date string.
If you insist in using dd and MM and yyyy in your UI, I’d localize it with setLocalizedDateFormatFromTemplate so that the day and the month appear in the logical order that this particular user would expect (month-followed-by-day for US users, day-followed-by-month for most other locales).
Thus:
let serverDateFormatter = DateFormatter()
serverDateFormatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
serverDateFormatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
serverDateFormatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSSSSX"
let uiFormatter = DateFormatter()
uiFormatter.dateStyle = .medium // or uiFormatter.setLocalizedDateFormatFromTemplate("ddMMyyyy")
if let date = serverDateFormatter.date(from: creationDateString) {
let string = uiFormatter.string(from: date)
// use that `string` in your UI
}