The easiest way to get a formatted element is to use the formatted method that is available on a myriad of data types without the need to instantiate our own formatter. And the best thing is that all these things are also available directly on SwiftUI controls like Text and TextField by using the format parameter.

Below are the most common/useful ones I’ve found so far.

Dates

In order to get a date formatted, we can simply call formatted on a Date type, which gives us the full, long formatted date:

Date.now.formatted() // "7/16/2022, 1:15 PM"

Of course this by itself is not very useful, but we can customize how we want the date to be shown by adding parameters to the function call. If we add .timeDate as a parameter we’ll get the same result, but now we can chain calls in a fluent fashion to customize the output, for example:

Date.now.formatted(
    .dateTime.hour().minute()
) // "1:15 PM"

Date.now.formatted(
    .dateTime.year().month()
) // "Jul 2022"

You can also pass parameters to each individual component:

Date.now.formatted(
    .dateTime.year(.twoDigits).month()
) // "Jul 22"

Relative dates

Using the relative parameter, we can get how long it’s been in a relative fashion since a date:

Date.now.addingTimeInterval(-15000).formatted(
    .relative(presentation: .numeric)
) // "4 hours ago"

Date ranges

If you use formatted on a range of dates, you get the duration between the two dates:

let now = Date.now
let in16Minutes = Date.now.addingTimeInterval(1000)
(now..<in16Minutes).formatted(
    .components(style: .narrow)
) // "16min 40sec"

Currencies

16.40.formatted(.currency(code: "EUR")) // "€16.40"
25.34.formatted(.currency(code: "USD")) // "$25.34"

Sadly for this one it doesn’t seem to respect the currency’s usual symbol position and instead uses the one specified in the user’s location. In my case I have my computer language set to English US which by default positions the symbol in the left side while for Euros the symbol is usually on the right.

Numeric

12.formatted(.number.sign(strategy: .always())) // "+12"
12.formatted(.percent) // 12%