First off, the platform I'm working on: Swift 3 + iOS 10.3.
What I'm trying to accomplish:
- A user attempts to type in some text in a text view, which includes a time in some UITextView. For example: "Meeting at 10pm today".
- Now that I have the text, I want to glean the date from the event, which is "10pm today".
- I want to convert this information into a
Date()object.
What I know and have tried so far:
- NSDataDetectors: They are pretty useful for extracting this information from strings, but as you can see here, the user can input dates in a variety of formats, making it impossible for me cover all kinds of date formats for the
NSDateFormatter(). - UITextViews: They have data detection built-in, but this is primarily for non-editable text and is optimal for user-interaction purposes directly in the UI. I just need to extract this information.
What does it already? macOS. If you have used the Reminders or Calendar on macOS, inputting reminders/events is easy: In calendar, adding an event saying "Meeting at 10pm" creates an event called Meeting scheduled at 10pm and does not simply convert the whole text and create an event called "Meeting at 10pm".
So I am wondering as to how I can harness the above capability on iOS, which seems built-in on macOS? There seem to be no posts or tutorials on this specific capability (at least I could not find any). If there is no API for this, I would appreciate it if anyone could suggest an alternative to process dates from text such that I am able to accomplish the above.