Breaking Up a String in Objective-C - objective-c

Question

All,
I have a method that takes a date (YYYY-MM-DD H:M:S) from the database and creates a URL with the year, month and day components from the date string. My solution works but I was wondering if there is a better way to do this? How are the cool kids doing it? :-)
Thanks!
-(NSString *) prettyURLFrom:(NSString *)dateString{
NSString * URLString = #"";
NSString *URL = #"http://www.theblues.com/featured/article/";
NSArray *myWords = [dateString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:
[NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:#"-\" \" :"]
];
URLString = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#%#/%#/%#",
URL,
[myWords objectAtIndex:1],
[myWords objectAtIndex:2],
[myWords objectAtIndex:0]];
return URLString;
}

Answer 1

Like I said in the comments, I find it bizarre you're passing and returning values as strings when they probably should be NSDate and NSURL respectively.
I would probably do something like:
-(NSURL*)URLFromDate:(NSDate*)date
{
// Assumes user uses a gregorian calendar
NSDateComponents *dateComp = [[NSCalendar currentCalendar] components:(NSYearCalendarUnit | NSMonthCalendarUnit | NSDayCalendarUnit) fromDate:date];
return [NSURL URLWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:#"http://www.theblues.com/featured/article/%li/%li/%li"
, [dateComp year]
, [dateComp month]
, [dateComp day]]];
}

Answer 2

If you have NSDate object then you can use
NSDateComponents *components = [[NSCalendar currentCalendar] components:NSDayCalendarUnit | NSMonthCalendarUnit | NSYearCalendarUnit fromDate:date];
NSInteger day = [components day];
NSInteger month = [components month];
NSInteger year = [components year];
NSString to NSDate
[NSDateFormatter setDefaultFormatterBehavior:NSDateFormatterBehavior10_4];
NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:#"YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS"];
NSDate *dateFromString = [[NSDate alloc] init];
dateFromString = [dateFormatter dateFromString:#"1999-07-02 2:2:4"];