SwiftUI: Format Dates and Times the Easy Way

Displaying dates in SwiftUI has been made so easy now, that there is almost no reason to use DateFormatter anymore to display dates in SwiftUI. We will go over several examples to show how powerful this API has become, and there are more configurations that we aren’t going to show here. Hopefully, this article encourages you to check out everything you can do with dates and times in your app.

Before we get lost in all the cool things we are about to learn, please take a couple seconds to follow me and clap for the article so that we can help more people learn about this useful content.

Keep in mind, that these are formatted for my current locale (in America), another great part about this API, is that these examples will be formatted for whatever locale you run them in! That’s right, we as developers no longer have to worry about a date format looking incorrect in another country, and we get that formatting for free!

//  ContentView.swift
import SwiftUI

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        VStack {
            Text(Date.now, format: .dateTime.day().month().year())
            // Oct 7, 2023
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(date: .abbreviated, time: .omitted))
            // Oct 7, 2023
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(date: .long, time: .omitted))
            // October 7, 2023
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(date: .complete, time: .omitted))
            // Saturday, October 7, 2023
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(date: .numeric, time: .omitted))
            // 10/7/2023
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(date: .omitted, time: .complete))
            // 6:53:39 PM CDT
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(date: .omitted, time: .standard))
            // 6:53:39 PM
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(date: .omitted, time: .shortened))
            // 6:53 PM
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(.dateTime.dayOfYear()))
            // 280
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(.dateTime.era()))
            // AD
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(.dateTime.quarter()))
            // Q4
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(.dateTime.week()))
            // 40
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(.dateTime.weekday()))
            // Sat
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(.dateTime.year(.twoDigits)))
            // 23
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(.dateTime.month(.narrow)))
            // O (this is an O for October, not a zero)
            
            Text(Date.now.formatted(.dateTime.hour(.twoDigits(amPM: .wide))))
            // 06 PM
        }
        .padding()
    }
}

#Preview {
    ContentView()
}

If you are looking for more ways to format dates and times, check out another article I wrote that shows more methods for iOS 18 and Xcode 16 here: https://medium.com/@jpmtech/new-text-formatters-in-ios-18-4c9037e1d980

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