How to check whether a date is inside a date range

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    May 28th 2019

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

Similar solutions…

• How to check whether an integer lies inside a range
• How to check whether one date is similar to another
• Using stride() to loop over a range of numbers
• Check whether all items in an array match a condition
• How to check whether a string contains any words from an array

About the Swift Knowledge Base

This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.