$Id: 169

$SOId: 80100032

If you prefer strftime style of formatting time values (as used in Python or Ruby) or porting code that uses that style, you can use one of several libraries.

Here’s an example using github.com/jehiah/go-strftime package:

// no playground
package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"

	strftime "github.com/jehiah/go-strftime"
)

func main() {
	// :show start
	t := time.Date(2017, 9, 4, 3, 38, 45, 0, time.UTC)
	fmt.Println(strftime.Format("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", t))
	// :show end
}

Side note on package naming: since the package name is strftime, the import path / repository path should be github.com/jehiah/strftime. It’s bad style to add go or go- to repository path.

Unfortunately, when it comes to parsing things are not as good. There are two packages:

• https://godoc.org/github.com/jeffjen/datefmt
• https://godoc.org/github.com/knz/strtime

but they both are cgo-wrappers around C libraries, which makes them more finicky to build, especially on Windows.

List of strftime directives

Untitled

You can also use http://www.strfti.me/ service to help you build strftime formatting strings.