Format date on Go

April 14, 2022 – 2 min – 302 words

Assume we have the following code:

t := time.Now()
fmt.Println(t.Format("yyyyMMddHHmmss"))

How can we format the date in the format: yyyyMMddHHmmss? The question is very simple and the answer is almost trivial. However, the reason for this answer conceals one of the great nightmares of programmers writing with GoLang.

2 January 2006

To format the date simply enter fmt.Println(t.Format("20060102150405")). Hmm, it looks very strange at first glance. Why do we include a date? And why 2 January 2006?

It actually turns out that behind this absurd, hand-picked date, there is a very clever engineering choice. The ‘Parse’ function that is used to parse a string does not use any parsing rules, but relies on the ‘query-by-example’. The query-by-example is a technique for parsing a string based on an example query that is compared with the parsed string.

This date was chosen for the timestamp representation of the date; in fact if we took the date (Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006 ), we would find that:

Go’s code does indeed mention the query-by-example:

// The layout string used by the Parse function and Format method
// shows by example how the reference time should be represented.
// We stress that one must show how the reference time is formatted,
// not a time of the user's choosing. Thus each layout string is a
// representation of the time stamp,
// Jan 2 15:04:05 2006 MST
// An easy way to remember this value is that it holds, when presented
// in this order, the values (lined up with the elements above):
// 1 2 3 4 5 6 -7

Some details and a historical discussion can be found on Github.