Minutes between two times in swift

Question

I got a string "14:05"

How could I compare it with current time and get time difference in minutes?

Difference may be both negative and positive(current time is before string or after)

Answer 1

Calendar has powerful methods to do that.

Any explicit math with 60, 3600 or even 86400 is not needed at all.

• Convert the time string to Date.
• Get the hour and minute date components from the current and the converted date.
• Calculate the difference with dateComponents(:from:to: by specifying only the minute component.

---

let time = "14:05"
let dateFormatter = DateFormatter()
dateFormatter.dateFormat = "HH:mm"
let timeDate = dateFormatter.date(from: time)!
let calendar = Calendar.current
let timeComponents = calendar.dateComponents([.hour, .minute], from: timeDate)
let nowComponents = calendar.dateComponents([.hour, .minute], from: Date())

let difference = calendar.dateComponents([.minute], from: timeComponents, to: nowComponents).minute!

Answer 2

For getting minutes difference between two dates I have done like below.

You can keep this method in common class and call.

func getMinutesDifferenceFromTwoDates(start: Date, end: Date) -> Int
   {

       let diff = Int(end.timeIntervalSince1970 - start.timeIntervalSince1970)

       let hours = diff / 3600
       let minutes = (diff - hours * 3600) / 60
       return minutes
   }

Answer 3

Despite all the answers, I found Narashima's one the most straight forward. However, here there is a more straightforward one.

let startDate = Date()
let endDate = Date(timeInterval: 86400, since: startDate)

let diffSeconds = Int(endDate.timeIntervalSince1970 - startDate.timeIntervalSince1970)

let minutes = diffSeconds / 60
let hours = diffSeconds / 3600