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Introduction to SwiftDate

• 1.0 - Dates & Cocoa
• 1.1 - Region & DateInRegion
• 1.2 - The Default Region
• 1.3 - Create Region
• 1.4 - Create DateInRegion
  • 1.4.1 - From String
  • 1.4.2 - From Date Components
  • 1.4.3 - From TimeInterval
  • 1.4.4 - From Date

1.0 - Dates & Cocoa

Generally when you talk about dates you are brought to think about a particular instance of time in a particular location of the world. However, in order to get a fully generic implementation Apple made Date fully independent from any particular geographic location, calendar or locale.

A plain Date object just represent an absolute value: in fact it count the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 2001.

This is what we call Universal Time because it represent the same moment everywhere around the world.

You can see absolute time as the moment that someone in the USA has a telephone conversation with someone in Dubai; both have that conversation at the same moment (the absolute time) but the local time will be different due to time zones, different calendars, alphabets or notation methods.

let now = Date()
print("\(now.timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate) seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 2001 @ 00:00 UTC")

However, we often need to represent a date in a more specific context: a particular place in the world, printing them using the rules of a specified locale and more.

In order to accomplish it we need to introduce several other objects: a Calendar, a TimeZone and a Locale; combining these attributes we're finally ready to provide a representation of the date into the real world.

SwiftDate allows you to parse, create, manipulate and inspect dates in an easy and more natural way than Cocoa itself.

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1.1 - Region & DateInRegion

In order to simplify the date management in a specific context SwiftDate introduces two simple structs:

• Region is a struct which define a region in the world (TimeZone) a language (Locale) and reference calendar (Calendar).
• DateInRegion represent an absolute date in a specific region. When you work with this object all components are evaluated in the context of the region in which the object was created. Inside a DateInRegion you will have an absoluteDate and region properties.

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1.2 - The Default Region

In SwiftDate you can work both with DateInRegion and Date instances. Even plain Date objects uses Region when you need to extract time units, compare dates or evaluate specific operations.

However this is a special region called Default Region and - by default - it has the following attributes:

• Time Zone = GMT - this allows to keep a coerent behaviour with the default Date managment unless you change it.
• Calendar = current's device calendar (auto updating)
• Locale = current's device locale (auto updating)

While it's a good choice to always uses DateInRegion you can also work with Date by changing the default region as follow:

let rome = Region(calendar: Calendars.gregorian, zone: Zones.europeRome, locale: Locales.italian)
SwiftDate.defaultRegion = rome

Since now all Date instances uses rome as default region both for parsing and evaluating date components:

let dateInRome = "2018-01-01 00:00:00".toDate()!
print("Current year is \(dateInRome.year) and hour is \(dateInRome.hour)") // "Current year is 2018 and hour is 0\n"

We can still convert this date to the default absolute representation in UTC using the convertTo(region:) function:

let dateInUTC = dateInRome.convertTo(region: Region.UTC)
print("Current year is \(dateInUTC.year) and hour is \(dateInUTC.hour)") // "Current year is 2017 and hour is 23\n"

Be careful while setting the default region. We still reccomends to use the DateInRegion instances instead, this allows you to read the region explicitly.

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1.3 - Create Region

As you seen from previous example creating a new Region is pretty straightforward; you need to specify the locale (used to print localized values like month or weekday name of the date), a timezone and a calendar (usually gregorian).

Region instances accept the following parameters in form of protocols:

• Time zone as ZoneConvertible conform object. You can pass both a TimeZone instance or any of the predefined timezones region defined inside the Zones enumeration.
• Calendar as CalendarConvertible conform object. You can pass both a Calendar instance or any of the predefined calendars available inside the Calendars enumeration.
• Locale as LocaleConvertible conform object. You can pass a both a Locale instance or any of the predefined locales available inside the Locales enumeration.

Using Zones, Calendars and Locales enumeration values is the easiest way to create a region and compiler can also suggest you the best match for your search.

The following example create two regions with different attributes:

let regionNY = Region(calendar: Calendars.gregorian, zone: Zones.americaNewYork, locale: Locales.englishUnitedStates)
let regionTokyo = Region(calendar: Calendars.gregorian, zone: Zones.asiaTokyo, locale: Locales.japanese)

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1.4 - Create DateInRegion

Now you are ready to create a new DateInRegion. There are many different ways to create a new date: parsing a string, setting time components, derivating it from another date or from a given time intervals.

Each initialization method require a region parameter which defines the region in which the date is expressed (default values may vary based upon the init and are listed below).

1.4.1 - From String

The most common case is to parse a string and transform it to a date. As you know DateFormatter is an expensive object to create and if you need to parse multiple strings you should avoid creating a new instance in your loop. Don't worry: using SwiftDate the library helps you by reusing its own parser, shared along the caller thread.

DateInRegion's init(_:format:region) can be used to initialize a new date from a string (various shortcut are available under the toXXX prefix of String extensions.

This object takes three parameters:

• the string to parse (String)
• the format of the string (String): this represent the format in which the string is expressed. It's a unicode format (See the table of fields). If you skip this parameter SwiftDate attempts to parse the date using one of the built-in formats defined in SwiftDate.autoFormats array. If you know the format of the date you should explicitly set it in order to get better performances.
• the region in which the date is expressed (Region). By default is set to SwiftDate.defaultRegion.

let date1 = DateInRegion("2016-01-05", format: "yyyy-MM-dd", region: regionNY)
let date2 = DateInRegion("2015-09-24T13:20:55", region: regionNY)

1.4.2 - From Components

You can create a DateInRegion also by setting the date components. The following method create a date from DateComponents instance passed via builder pattern:

let date3 = DateInRegion(components: {
	$0.year = 2018
	$0.month = 2
	$0.day = 1
	$0.hour = 23
}, region: regionNY)

You can also instance it by passing single (optional) components:

let date4 = DateInRegion(year: 2015, month: 2, day: 4, hour: 20, minute: 00, second: 00, region: regionNY)

1.4.3 - From TimeInterval

As plain Date you can create a new DateInRegion just passing an absolute time interval which represent the seconds/milliseconds from Unix epoch. The following method create a date 1 year after the Unix Epoch (1971-01-01T00:00:00Z):

let date5 = DateInRegion(seconds: 1.years.timeInterval, region: regionNY)
let date6 = DateInRegion(milliseconds: 5000, region: regionNY)

1.4.4 - From Date

Finally you can init a new DateInRegion directly specifyng an absolute Date and a destination region:

let absoluteDate: Date = (Date() - 2.months).dateAt(.startOfDay)
let date7 = DateInRegion(absoluteDate, region: regionNY)

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