NSDateFormatter's init method is deprecated?

Question

Per

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSDateFormatter_Class/Reference/Reference.html

The init method of NSDateFormatter is "Available in iPhone OS 2.0 through iPhone OS 3.2", and therefore not in 4.0. Now, it certainly works, but this seems odd. Is this is a mistake or is there some other way to create a NSDateFormatter?

Answer 1

This deprecation is just apple cleaning up the headers for NSDateFormatter. init is already declared in NSObject which NSNumberFormatter inherits from. Redeclaring is not necessary, however in the implementation apple will override init as subclassess should provide implementations for the default initializer of the superclass.

Answer 2

Like falconcreek said here, Apple is just clearing the docs.

That means that originally, - (id) init has been redeclared in the NSDateFormatter header file. That was unnecessary and somebody just removed it later. The documentation is probably generated automatically and didn't picked up that it was only the redecleration that was deprecated.

In short, use init as you wish with NSDateFormatter!

Answer 3

I would trust the header files over the documentation.

For example, Formatter Behaviors and OS Versions seems to contradict itself:

By default, on Mac OS X v10.4 instances of NSDateFormatter have the same behavior as they did on Mac OS X versions 10.0 to 10.3. On Mac OS X v10.5 and later, NSDateFormatter defaults to the 10.4+ behavior.

If you initialize a formatter using initWithDateFormat:allowNaturalLanguage:, you are (for backwards compatibility reasons) creating an “old-style” date formatter. To use the new behavior, you initialize the formatter with init. If necessary, you can set the default class behavior using setDefaultFormatterBehavior:), you can set the behavior for an instance using setFormatterBehavior: message with the argument NSDateFormatterBehavior10_4.

It sounds like initWithDateFormat:allowNaturalLanguage: is actually the deprecated method?

Answer 4

That’s really strange. Maybe +[NSDateFormatter new] will do the job?