Swift get the remaining seconds of time on target string date - swift

Question

The current date time today was May 9, 2020 10:03 PM, and I have a target string date with the value of 2020-05-09 22:07:30 with the format of yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.
How can I get the remaining date from that 2 date and print the value with the string of 04:30 as the range of those 2 dates are 4 minutes and 30 seconds
What I can only do is convert the milliseconds to time format like
func msToTime(ms: Int) {
let seconds = ms % 60
let minutes = ms / 60000
return String(format: "%0.2d:%0.2d",minutes,seconds)
}
Output 04:30
But I don't know how to get the range of milliseconds from today's date time to target's date time.
Or if there's any other easier way to do it?

Answer 1

You can use Calendar and DateComponents to easily calculate differences between dates in whatever units you desire. For example, this gets the difference in minutes and seconds:
let dateformatter = DateFormatter()
dateformatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"
let date = dateformatter.date(from: "2020-05-09 22:07:30")!
let now = Date()
let components = Calendar.current.dateComponents([.minute, .second], from: now, to: date)
print("difference: \(components.minute!):\(components.second!)")

Answer 2

A straightforward way, with no calculation of any kind needed:
let d1 = Date()
let s = "2020-05-09 22:07:30"
let f = DateFormatter()
f.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"
f.timeZone = TimeZone.current // or whatever
if let d2 = f.date(from: s) {
let f = DateComponentsFormatter()
f.unitsStyle = .positional
let result = f.string(from: d1, to: d2)
}
If you don't like the resulting string format of result, you can eliminate pieces of it. — However, note that this works only because no full days are involved. It isn't clear what the range of possible inputs might be or what the desired output would be if the second date were three months into the future, for example.