Overview

Parse function of time package in golang can be used to parse the string representation of time into time.Time object

Package link – https://golang.org/pkg/time/#Parse

If you have worked with time/date formatting/parsing in other languages you might have noticed that the other languages use special placeholders for time/date formatting. For eg ruby language uses

• %d for day
• %Y for year

etc. Golang, instead of using codes such as above, uses date and time format placeholders that look like date and time only. Go uses standard time, which is:

Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006 (MST is GMT-0700)
or
01/02 03:04:05PM '06 -0700

So if you notice Go uses

• 01 for the day of the month,
• 02 for the month
• 03 for hours,
• 04 for minutes
• 05 for second
• and so on

Below placeholder table describes the exact mapping. Go takes a more pragmatic approach where you don’t need to remember or lookup for the traditional formatting codes as in other languages

Type	Placeholder
Day	2 or 02 or _2
Day of Week	Monday or Mon
Month	01 or 1 or Jan or January
Year	2006 or 06
Hour	03 or 3 or 15
Minutes	04 or 4
Seconds	05 or 5
Milli Seconds (ms)	.000 //Trailing zero will be includedor .999 //Trailing zero will be omitted
Micro Seconds (μs)	.000000 //Trailing zero will be includedor .999999 //Trailing zero will be omitted
Nano Seconds (ns)	.000000000 //Trailing zero will be includedor .999999999 //Trailing zero will be omitted
am/pm	PM or pm
Timezone	MST
Timezone offset	Z0700 or Z070000 or Z07 or Z07:00 or Z07:00:00 or -0700 or -070000 or -07 or -07:00 or -07:00:00

Now coming back to time.Parse

time.Parse function takes in two arguments

• First argument is the layout consisting of time format placeholder
• Second argument is the actual formatted string representing time.

The way you have to go about this is to make sure that the layout string (first argument ) matches the string representation (second argument) of the time you want to parse into time.Time.

• For parsing 2023-01-29, layout string should be 06-01-02 or 2006-01-02 or something which maps correctly based on the above placeholder table.

• Similarly for parsing “2023-Jan-29 Wednesday 12:19:25” the layout string can be “2006-Jan-02 Monday 03:04:05”

time.Parse will raise an error if it encounters an error while parsing time.

Code

Below are the working Code Examples of time.Parse().

package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main() {
//Parse YYYY-MM-DD
timeT, _ := time.Parse("2006-01-02", "2023-01-29")
fmt.Println(timeT)
//Parse YY-MM-DD
timeT, _ = time.Parse("06-01-02", "20-01-29")
fmt.Println(timeT)
//Parse YYYY-#{MonthName}-DD
timeT, _ = time.Parse("2006-Jan-02", "2023-Jan-29")
fmt.Println(timeT)
//Parse YYYY-#{MonthName}-DD WeekDay HH:MM:SS
timeT, _ = time.Parse("2006-Jan-02 Monday 03:04:05", "2023-Jan-29 Wednesday 12:19:25")
fmt.Println(timeT)
//Parse YYYY-#{MonthName}-DD WeekDay HH:MM:SS PM Timezone TimezoneOffset
timeT, _ = time.Parse("2006-Jan-02 Monday 03:04:05 PM MST -07:00", "2023-Jan-29 Wednesday 12:19:25 AM IST +05:30")
fmt.Println(timeT)
}

Output:

2023-01-29 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
2023-01-29 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
2023-01-29 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
2023-01-29 12:19:25 +0000 UTC
2023-01-29 00:19:25 +0530 IST