Parsing Dates in XML for iOS SDK using TBXML

I'm using the TBXML parser. I'm not sure this is specific to TBXML or not. I have an XML file that has a date in. I'm then parsing this using TBXML. I then want to format this date using NSDateFormatter, however when I debug this and output using NSLog, it displays as (null).

Here is my XML:

<locations>
    <location>
        <place>null</place>
        <geo>null</geo>
        <location_date>2010-12-25 10:15:15 +0000</location_date>
    </location>
    <location>
        ...
    </location>
</locations>

This is how I'm parsing. I've loaded the XML file in ok (I've tested other nodes and I can output the values ok so it's reading the XML fine. I detect root and then do a while loop around the node. I have created a Location class that has the relevant properties to hold the retrieved XML node values. These are all NSString, however I did try NSDate for locationDate.

Should I be storing the date differently in the node? Happy to provide more code if need开发者_如何学JAVAed.

if (root) {
        // search for the first location element within the root element's children
        TBXMLElement * location = [TBXML childElementNamed:@"location" parentElement:root];
        NSDateFormatter *formatter=[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
        [formatter setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMdd"];

        // if an location element was found
        while (location != nil) {

            // instantiate an location object
            Location * aLocation = [[Location alloc] init];

            TBXMLElement * locationDate = [TBXML childElementNamed:@"location_date" parentElement:location];

            // if we found a locationDate
            if (locationDate != nil) {
                aLocation.locationDate = [TBXML textForElement:locationDate];
                NSDate *locDate=[formatter dateFromString:aLocation.locationDate];
                NSLog(@"the current location date is %@", locDate);
            }

            [locations addObject:aLocation];
        [aLocation release];

            // find the next sibling element named "location"
            location = [TBXML nextSiblingNamed:@"location" searchFromElement:location];

        }
    }

The console output I get is:

the current location date is (null)

The idea would be to then put this in a format so I can compare the dates against now, however I can't even read the dates in from the xml and format them properly yet.

Any help is appreciated.

Paul

---

Your DateFormat is not correct. If it's not perfectly set up, the resulting string will be nil. Try it this way:

[formatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss +ZZZ"];

Check here for a nice reference for NSDateFormatter:

http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/05/simple-methods-for-date-formatting-and.html