Parse Go time stamp using Go

Question

Go prints time with

time.Now().String()

as

2012-12-18 06:09:18.6155554 +0200 FLEST

or

2009-11-10 23:00:00 +0000 UTC

http://play.golang.org/p/8qwq9U_Ri5

How do I parse it?

I guess FLEST is Finland Latvian Estonian Standard Time I am not in these countries and I guess I can get all kind of time zones. I can't find one unified way or pattern to parse it with time.Parse

Answer 1

Though time.Parse() accepts a format string such as 2006-01-02 15:04:05 -0700 MST, it may be simpler to use one of the constants defined in time.

const (
    ANSIC       = "Mon Jan _2 15:04:05 2006"
    UnixDate    = "Mon Jan _2 15:04:05 MST 2006"
    RubyDate    = "Mon Jan 02 15:04:05 -0700 2006"
    RFC822      = "02 Jan 06 15:04 MST"
    RFC822Z     = "02 Jan 06 15:04 -0700" // RFC822 with numeric zone
    RFC850      = "Monday, 02-Jan-06 15:04:05 MST"
    RFC1123     = "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 MST"
    RFC1123Z    = "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" // RFC1123 with numeric zone
    RFC3339     = "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00"
    RFC3339Nano = "2006-01-02T15:04:05.999999999Z07:00"
    Kitchen     = "3:04PM"
    // Handy time stamps.
    Stamp      = "Jan _2 15:04:05"
    StampMilli = "Jan _2 15:04:05.000"
    StampMicro = "Jan _2 15:04:05.000000"
    StampNano  = "Jan _2 15:04:05.000000000"
)

If you're using the strings as a way to store or encode time, (such as with a restrictive encoding format,) you may want to consider using Unix time. That way, you could just store an int64 (or two, if you keep the number of nanoseconds.

Answer 2

package main

import (
"fmt"
"time"
)

func main() {
    fmt.Println(time.Now())
    date := "2009-11-10 23:00:00 +0000 UTC"
    t, err := time.Parse("2006-01-02 15:04:05 -0700 MST", date)
        if err != nil {
                fmt.Println("parse error", err.Error())
        }
        fmt.Println(t.Format(time.ANSIC))
}

Playground: http://play.golang.org/p/hvqBgtesLd

See the source code at http://golang.org/src/pkg/time/format.go?s=15404:15450#L607