Golang Time Format

Go allows you to format and parse time out of the box provided by the time package. You can specify your target format using pattern-based layouts using the Format() method. Unlike typical date and time formatting options such as YYYY-MM-DD, go uses a specific layout parameter.

Using this short guide, you will understand how to format time in Golang using various formats and patterns.

The Basics

We use the Format() method and pass a Time object as the parameter to format time in go. The function syntax is as shown:

func (t Time) Format(layout string) string

The function will return the time value formatted to the specified layout. You can define custom formats or use pre-defined ones. These include:

The layouts use the reference time on Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006 to indicate the pattern under which to format the time object.

Example 1 – Custom Layouts

Let us look at a few examples of formatting time using various custom layouts.

func yyyy_mm_dd() {
    current_time := time.Now()
    fmt.Println(current_time.Format("2006-01-02"))
}

In the example above, we grab the current time using the time.Now() method. Next, we format the current time to YYYY-MM-DD using the reference date.

We can now execute the code above as shown:

$ go run time_format.go
2022-01-17

If we want to include the date and time in the 24-hr system, we can set the format as shown in the snippet below:

current_time := time.Now()
fmt.Println(current_time.Format("2006-01-02 15:04:05"))

The above code should return the output as:

2022-01-17 14:46:46

To display the time in 12hr clock, we can do:

current_time := time.Now()
fmt.Println(current_time.Format("2006-01-02 3:4:5 pm"))

The code returns the output as:

2022-01-17 2:47:37 pm

Example 2 – Pre-Defined Layouts

You can also format according to a pre-defined layout by passing the layout as a string to the Format() Method.

Consider the following examples:

func format_pre_defined() {
    current_time := time.Now()
    fmt.Println("ANSIC -> ", current_time.Format(time.ANSIC))
    fmt.Println("UnixDate -> ", current_time.Format(time.UnixDate))
    fmt.Println("Kitchen -> ", current_time.Format(time.Kitchen))
    fmt.Println("RFC3339 -> ", current_time.Format(time.RFC3339))
    fmt.Println("RubyDate -> ", current_time.Format(time.RubyDate))
    fmt.Println("RFC822 -> ", current_time.Format(time.RFC822))
    fmt.Println("RFC1123Z -> ", current_time.Format(time.RFC1123Z))
}

Once we run the above code, it should return the current time formatted into various pre-defined formats. An example output is as shown:

ANSIC ->  Mon Jan 17 14:56:03 2022
UnixDate ->  Mon Jan 17 14:56:03 EAT 2022
Kitchen ->  2:56PM
RFC3339 ->  2022-01-17T14:56:03+03:00
RubyDate ->  Mon Jan 17 14:56:03 +0300 2022
RFC822 ->  17 Jan 22 14:56 EAT
RFC1123Z ->  Mon, 17 Jan 2022 14:56:03 +0300

Closing

This guide covers the basics of time formatting in the go programming language using the Format() method from the time package.

from https://ift.tt/nvN9fGT