CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gotimestampdate-conversion
bvpx
bvpx

Reputation: 1297

golang RFC2822 conversion

Is there a library or function in the included libraries that converts an RFC timestamp to Unix time (or another format that I can then format into Unix time?)

For example, I'd like to change this Tue Sep 16 21:58:58 +0000 2014 to a Unix timestamp.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3921

Answers (1)

peterSO
peterSO

Reputation: 166915

For example,

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    s := "Tue Sep 16 21:58:58 +0000 2014"
    const rfc2822 = "Mon Jan 02 15:04:05 -0700 2006"
    t, err := time.Parse(rfc2822, s)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
        return
    }
    u := t.Unix()
    fmt.Println(u)
    f := t.Format(time.UnixDate)
    fmt.Println(f)
}

Output:

1410904738
Tue Sep 16 21:58:58 +0000 2014

References:

Package time

RFC2822: 3.3. Date and Time Specification

NOTE:

There is a package time format constant named RubyDate; it's a misnomer.

The Go authors were misled by Go Issue 518 which claimed that Ruby Time.now outputs Tue Jan 12 02:52:59 -0800 2010. However,

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
print Time.now
print "\n"

Output:

2014-09-20 19:40:32 -0400

Later, the issue was revised to say that Tue Jan 12 02:52:59 -0800 2010 was the date format used by the Twitter API. In the beginning, in the "Fail Whale" days, Twitter used Ruby-on-Rails, which may be why they assumed it was a Ruby date format.

I didn't use the time.RubyDate constant in my example since it's misleading. A constant named rfc2822 provides better documentation.

References:

Go: Issue 518: time.Parse - numeric time zones and spacing

Diff of format.go revision 0f80c5e80c0e

Twitter Search is Now 3x Faster

Upvotes: 7

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