Parsing a string containing date and time is one common task any programmer would encounter. It is also one of the most frustrating one, if you can't remember the specific format string correctly (is if %b or %B?).

Go does datetime parsing slightly differently. Instead of having cryptic format strings, go uses something called layouts. There is one special date that you need to remember whenever you need to parse dates in go.

Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006

Why this specific date?

If you write it down in this format, it's obvious.

01/02 03:04:05PM ‘06 -0700.

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

time.Parse and Time.Format

Now whenever you need to parse a date string, you have to use this layout and pass to the time.Parse function. And if you have a time.Time type, you can use the Format function to convert it to a string using the same layout structure.

input := "2018-04-24"
layout := "2006-01-02"
t, _ := time.Parse(layout, input)
fmt.Println(t)                       // 2018-04-24 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
fmt.Println(t.Format("02-Jan-2006")) // 24-Apr-2018

Date and Time Options Cheatsheet

You can use this table below as a quick cheatsheet for the different date and time options and the layout params you need to use.

Common Date Time formats