How to Parse Date String in Go

1. Representation of Date and Time in Go
2. Parse Date String in Go

Date parsing is one of the most common tasks encountered in the programming world. Go uses a standard date, unlike other programming languages that use codes to represent parts of a date/time string representation. Parsing in Go is done with the help of Parse and Format functions in the time package.

Representation of Date and Time in Go

To parse the date in Go, we use something called layout. There is a standard time in Go which we need to remember while parsing dates in Go:

Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006

It is January 2nd, 3:04:05 PM of 2006, UTC-0700.

Parse Date String in Go

To parse a date string, we pass this layout to the time.Parse function. We use real-time as the format without specifying the date using letters in parse function which makes parse function quite interesting.

time.Parse function takes layout consisting of time format placeholder as a first argument and actual formatted string representing time as a second argument.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	timeT, _ := time.Parse("2006-01-02", "2020-04-14")
	fmt.Println(timeT)

	timeT, _ = time.Parse("06-01-02", "20-04-14")
	fmt.Println(timeT)

	timeT, _ = time.Parse("2006-Jan-02", "2020-Apr-14")
	fmt.Println(timeT)

	timeT, _ = time.Parse("2006-Jan-02 Monday 03:04:05", "2020-Apr-14 Tuesday 23:19:25")
	fmt.Println(timeT)

	timeT, _ = time.Parse("2006-Jan-02 Monday 03:04:05 PM MST -07:00", "2020-Apr-14 Tuesday 11:19:25 PM IST +05:30")
	fmt.Println(timeT)
}

Output:

2020-04-14 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
2020-04-14 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
2020-04-14 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
0001-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
2020-04-14 23:19:25 +0530 IST

Go has some predefined time layout constant in its package.

We could use the predefined constant as above instead of layout string to parse the date-time.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	timeT, _ := time.Parse(time.RFC3339, "2020-04-15T13:45:26Z")
	fmt.Println(timeT)
}

Output:

2020-04-15 13:45:26 +0000 UTC

If we have a time.Time type, we use the Format function to convert it to a string.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	input := "2020-04-14"
	layout := "2006-01-02"
	t, _ := time.Parse(layout, input)
	fmt.Println(t)
	fmt.Println(t.Format("02-Jan-2006"))

}

Output:

2020-04-14 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
14-Apr-2020