NSDateFormatter, am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

Question

I'm trying to print out the date in a certain format:

NSDate *today = [[NSDate alloc] init]; NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init]; [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmss"]; NSString *dateStr = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:today]; 

If the iPhone is set to 24 hour time, this works fine, if on the other hand the user has set it to 24 hour time, then back to AM/PM (it works fine until you toggle this setting) then it appends the AM/PM on the end even though I didn't ask for it:

20080927030337 PM 

Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug with firmware 2.1?

Edit 1: Made description clearer

Edit 2 workaround: It turns out this is a bug, to fix it I set the AM and PM characters to "":

[dateFormatter setAMSymbol:@""]; [dateFormatter setPMSymbol:@""]; 

Answer 1

The reason for this behaviour is Locale, It sets the correct Locale.

Set the local of your NSDateFormatter to en_US_POSIX will fix this. It works for both 24-hour and 12 hour format.

On iPhone OS, the user can override the default AM/PM versus 24-hour time setting (via Settings > General > Date & Time > 24-Hour Time), which causes NSDateFormatter to rewrite the format string you set. From apple doc

Try this,

NSDate *today = [[NSDate alloc] init]; NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init]; [dateFormatter setLocale:[[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@"en_US_POSIX"]]; [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMddHHmmss"]; NSString *dateStr = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:today];