Modifying dates in Swift
In this post, we’ll look at how to modify dates in Swift. We’ll also extend Date with ways to modify dates with clean, readable code.
The basics
Date manipulation is a common task in many apps. For instance, we may want to know the date five hours from now, to schedule an operation, refresh or remove data etc.
Date has an addingTimeInterval(...) function that can add and remove a TimeInterval (a typealias for Double seconds) to any date and returns the resulting date.
For instance, this adds an hour to the current date:
Date().addingTimeInterval(3600)
and this removes an hour from the current date:
Date().addingTimeInterval(-3600)
However, I find addingTimeInterval cumbersome to use when you want more fine-grained control or use larger units than seconds. Also, the code isn’t that readable.
Date extensions
We can use the function above in a set of Date extensions, to get more readable code:
public extension Date {
func adding(days: Double) -> Date {
let seconds = Double(days) * 60 * 60 * 24
return addingTimeInterval(seconds)
}
func adding(hours: Double) -> Date {
let seconds = Double(hours) * 60 * 60
return addingTimeInterval(seconds)
}
func adding(minutes: Double) -> Date {
let seconds = Double(minutes) * 60
return addingTimeInterval(seconds)
}
func adding(seconds: Double) -> Date {
addingTimeInterval(Double(seconds))
}
func removing(days: Double) -> Date {
adding(days: -days)
}
func removing(hours: Double) -> Date {
adding(hours: -hours)
}
func removing(minutes: Double) -> Date {
adding(minutes: -minutes)
}
func removing(seconds: Double) -> Date {
adding(seconds: -seconds)
}
}
You can now modify dates with cleaner code and also chain multiple operations together:
let date = Date()
.adding(days: 3)
.adding(hours: 2)
.removing(seconds: 15)
I think this is much more readable than the time interval-based function.
Source Code
I have added these extensions to my SwiftUIKit library. You can find the source code here. Feel free to try it out and let me know what you think!