Get substring from string

In order of personal preference . . .

a) I'd parse it (using NSDateFormatter) into an NSDate object. They you can do whatever you want with it.

b) If you really only want the first part of the string, look into regular expressions.

c) If you're very confident about the formatting of the string, you could split it by the ' ' character and then join the first 3 substrings together :

NSArray *sub = [myDateString componentsSeperatedByString:@" "];
NSString *newDateString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ %@ %@", 
                           [sub objectAtIndex:0],
                           [sub objectAtIndex:1],
                           [sub objectAtIndex:2]];

Try this simple example

        NSString *dateStr = @"Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:54:41 +0000";
        NSDateFormatter *dateFormat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
         //NSDate *today = [NSDate date]
        [dateFormat setDateFormat:@"EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss z"];
        //NSString *dateString = [dateFormat stringFromDate:today];
        NSDate *date = [dateFormat dateFromString:dateStr];
        [dateFormat setDateFormat:@"EEE, dd MMM yyyy"];
        NSString *newStr = [dateFormat stringFromDate:date];
        NSLog(@"date: %@", newStr);
        [dateFormat release];