Is it possible to specify an ISO Date with a timezone (i.e. GMT offset) but without a time? - swift

Question

I'm trying to see if you can specify a date with a timezone in ISO but without also specifying a time.
This may seem odd to ask about having a timezone without actually having a time, but technically a date represents a range between two times... the 24-hour period spanning from midnight to midnight, and that 'midnight' has to be in a timezone.
In our case, we have an API that wants to say 'Filter things on-or-before date X and on-or-after date Y' and we want the user to specify 'April 9th' (in their time zone) for both to get all things that happen on that day.
Of course we solve this by adding a day to the first date, then changing it to a pure 'before', but the front-end is required to do that math. We can't do it on the backend because having to send a date with a time means we would be sending April 9th at midnight, then on the backend adding a day to that, but what if someone passed in 4pm?
We could fail the date if it has a non-midnight time, but then we're back to why pass it in the first place.
So again, can you have a date with a timezone but not have a time component?

Answer 1

To decode ISO8601 dates only with year-month-day and time zone set the appropriate formatOptions of the ISO8601DateFormatter
let isoFormatter = ISO8601DateFormatter()
isoFormatter.formatOptions = [.withFullDate, .withTimeZone]

Answer 2

If by time zone you mean a UTC offset (as used with ISO 8601 dates with times), this is no problem. If by time zone you mean a true time zone with historic, present and known future offsets from UTC, including for example summer time/DST, like America/New_York or North American Eastern Time, then ISO 8601 does not support that, neither for dates with nor without time of day.
2020-04-25-04:00
This is perfectly valid ISO 8601 for April 25 this year at offset -04:00. So you may use it for representing the interval from 2020-04-25T00:00-04:00 (inclusive) to 2020-04-26T00:00-04:00 (exclusive). Which would then be equivalent to 2020-04-25T04:00Z to 2020-04-26T04:00Z (Z meaning UTC).
Java example code
I don’t know any Swift, so cannot tell you how to format or parse such a string in Swift. In Java formatting it is not bad. Example:
LocalDate date = LocalDate.of(2020, Month.APRIL, 25);
String isoOffsetDateString = date
.atStartOfDay(ZoneId.of("America/New_York"))
.format(DateTimeFormatter.ISO_OFFSET_DATE);
System.out.println(isoOffsetDateString);
Output:
2020-04-25-04:00
I am using Java’s built-in ISO_OFFSET_DATE formatter. The documentation informs us that this formnatter is:
The ISO date formatter that formats or parses a date with an offset,
such as '2011-12-03+01:00'.
Parsing the string and producing the start and end of the day takes a little more:
TemporalAccessor parsed
= DateTimeFormatter.ISO_OFFSET_DATE.parse(isoOffsetDateString);
Instant start = LocalDate.from(parsed)
.atStartOfDay(ZoneOffset.from(parsed))
.toInstant();
Instant end = start.plus(1, ChronoUnit.DAYS);
System.out.println("From " + start + " inclusive to " + end + " exclusive");
From 2020-04-25T04:00:00Z inclusive to 2020-04-26T04:00:00Z exclusive
I have opted to convert to Instant, the class for a moment in time independent of offset or time zone. Instants print in UTC, as the trailing Z on each says. In your Java code you may prefer not to do this conversion or to do a different conversion, all depending on circumstances.
Link
Documentation of DateTimeFormatter.ISO_OFFSET_DATE