How to parse month in go from non-english String with

Question

I want to parse the following string to a date in go:

"This item will be released on March 9, 2014."

I followed this and came up whith:

func findReleaseDateString(raw string) time.Time {
  test, err := time.Parse("This item will be released on January 2, 2006.", raw)
  if err != nil {
      panic(err)
  }

 return test
}

Which works like a charm for english strings.

My problem: I would like to parse german strings. Like:

"Dieser Artikel wird am 9. März 2014 erscheinen."

I am aware, that I could match day, month and year via a regex and then parse it. But is there any possibility to tell time.Parse to use a different set of constants for month?

Answer 1

There is currently no i18n support for the time package. While waiting for that to happen, you can try using a wrapper package such as:

github.com/goodsign/monday

As stated by monday's documentation:

Monday is not an alternative to standard time package. It is a temporary solution to use while the internationalization features are not ready.

That's why monday doesn't create any additional parsing algorithms, layout identifiers. It is just a wrapper for time.Format and time.ParseInLocation and uses all the same layout IDs, constants, etc.

Here is your example using monday:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "github.com/goodsign/monday"
    "time"
)

func findReleaseDateString(raw string) time.Time {
    loc, _ := time.LoadLocation("Europe/Berlin")
    t, err := monday.ParseInLocation("Dieser Artikel wird am 2. January 2006 erscheinen.", raw, loc, monday.LocaleDeDE)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    return t
}

func main() {
    t := findReleaseDateString("Dieser Artikel wird am 9. März 2014 erscheinen.")
    fmt.Println(t)
}

Output:

2014-03-09 00:00:00 +0100 CET