Using DateFormatter produces a result which is off by a day - date

Question

Using DateFormatter produces a result that is off by a day (actually 12 hours). Using the following code consistently produces dates that show as the previous day. I've been getting this in a number of applications for a while but just finally got around to digging into it.
extension Date
{
func display() -> String
{
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "MMMM dd, yyyy"
print(dateFormatter.locale)
dateFormatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
let txt = dateFormatter.string(from: self)
print(txt)
return txt
}
}
Other questions that were in this vein suggested changing the locale, thus the added code for that, but I checked the locale and the actual date. If I add 8 hours to the date, I get the correct display result, but adding less than that does nothing. Some dates are being retrieved from the birthday field in the Contacts app, which yields dates that have a time of day 00:00:00 UTC. It would seem that I need to convert the date to local time? The timezone on the device is set to the local timezone (Pacific). That wouldn't seem so bad, but dates retrieved from a date picker aren't in UTC time, they're in local time. I haven't been able to figure out how to tell which timezone the date is in since using the calendar class and trying to extract the .timezone component says that "NSCalendarUnitTimeZone cannot be gotten by this method". Any suggestions on how to create a universal date formatter that works in all cases?

Answer 1

A couple of observations:
If your Date object is in UTC time zone, then set your formatter’s timeZone to TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0), too.
If you’re showing the string representation of a Date object in the UI, you do not want to use a locale of en_US_POSIX. You want to show it in the default locate of the device (i.e., don’t change the formatter’s locale at all). You only use en_US_POSIX when dealing with ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 date strings that are used internally or, for example, for exchanging date strings with a web service).
Finally, I would not specify a dateFormat string because not all users expect dates in MMMM dd, yyyy format. For example, UK users expect it in d MMMM yyyy format. When presenting dates in the UI, specify a dateStyle instead. Or, if none of those styles work, go ahead and specify dateFormat, but set it using setLocalizedDateFormatFromTemplate(_:) rather than a fixed string.
Thus, for your purpose, you would do:
extension Date {
var dateString: String {
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateStyle = .long
formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
return formatter.string(from: self)
}
}
Or, if you're calling this a lot, you may want to reuse the formatter:
extension Date {
private static let formatterForDateString: DateFormatter = {
let formatter = DateFormatter()
formatter.dateStyle = .long
formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
return formatter
}()
var dateString: String {
return Date.formatterForDateString.string(from: self)
}
}

Answer 2

Use the timeZone property, to get the exact date, as shown as below:
formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
it will solve your purpose!