How to check whether a date is inside a date range

Written by Paul Hudson    @twostraws

Everyone knows you can create ranges from two integers such as 1...5, but few people realize the same applies to dates. This means you can create a date range using the same closed-range operator (...) and half-open range operator (..<) you already know, allowing you to check whether one date lies inside a range.

For example, we could create three Date objects like this:

let now = Date()
let soon = Date().addingTimeInterval(5000)
let later = Date().addingTimeInterval(10000)

We can then compare now and later into a single range like this:

let range = now...later

Finally, we can check whether that range contains the soon date using the contains() method of ranges, like this:

if range.contains(soon) {
    print("The date is inside the range")
} else {
    print("The date is outside the range")
}

Available from iOS 8.0

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