Re: dateFromString always returns null

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 10 Feb 2013, at 21:01, Steven LeMaire wrote:

> Hi Everyone, 
> 
> I really don't understand why the code below isn't working for me. I've tried 
> setting a locale and timezone on the date formatter, but it's had no affect.
> I'm running this on Slackware 13.37, I've just updated to the latest stable 
> version of GNUstep also.
> Any help would be appreciated !
> 
> Thanks
> Steven
> 
> #import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
> #import <Foundation/NSDate.h>
> #import <Foundation/NSDateFormatter.h>
> int
> main(int argc, const char *argv[]) {
>  NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
> 
> 
>  NSDate *d;
>  NSDateFormatter *df = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
>  [df setDateFormat:@"yyyyMMdd"];
>  d = [df dateFromString:@"20130215"];
> 
>  NSLog(@"d is: %@", d);
> 
>  [pool release];
> 
>  return 0;
> }
> _

That looks fine to me ... so my best guess is you built base without support 
for NSDateFormatter.
That would happen if you are on a system where ICU is not installed or can't be 
found:
You should have seen a warning about that when you ran 'configure' for the base 
library.

The fix would be to rebuild base with ICU (I don't know slackware, but I guess 
you might need to install an ICU developer package).

A workaround would be to use NSCalendarDate rather than NSDateFormatter