How to parse a date string into an NSDate object in iOS?

You don't need near as many single quotes as you have (only needed on non date/time characters), so change this:

[self.dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss'Z'"];

To this:

[self.dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZZ"];...self.currentQuestion.updated = [self.dateFormatter dateFromString:[self.currentParsedCharacterData stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@":" withString:@"" options:0 range:NSMakeRange([self.currentParsedCharacterData length] – 5,5)]];

Documentation here: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/DataFormatting/Articles/dfDateFormatting10_4.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002369-SW1

Unicode Format Patterns: http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-6.html#Date_Format_Patterns

Dealing with TimeZones with Colons (+00:00): http://petersteinberger.com/2010/05/nsdateformatter-and-0000-parsing/

I was having the same problems with the colon at the end. Here's a function I used to normalize the date to make NSDate happy.

/** * Timezones are returned to us in the format +nn:nn * The date formatter currently does not support IS 8601 dates, so * we convert timezone from the format "+07:30" to "+0730" (removing the colon) which * can then be parsed properly. */- (NSString *)applyTimezoneFixForDate:(NSString *)date {    NSRange colonRange = [date rangeOfCharacterFromSet:[NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:@":"] options:NSBackwardsSearch];    return [date stringByReplacingCharactersInRange:colonRange withString:@""];}

It took me a while to find the simple answer for this. and there are a lot of solutions that involve bringing in extra third party code.

For those who are struggling with this now and are only supporting iOS 6 and above.

You can set the date formatter to

[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZZZZ"]

And this will properly handle the "-05:00" with the colon.