strftime

A Go package for strftime formatting

Package strftime provides functionality for formatting time based on the C strftime(3) function.

The Go standard library time package uses layout strings based on the reference time Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006 (AKA 01/02 03:04:05PM ‘06 -0700). The purpose of the strftime package is not to replace the time package layout based formatting or encourage Go developers to punt on learning to use the reference time. Instead this package exists for those cases where it's necessary to use strftime conversion specifications, such as when receiving timestamps from non Go systems which provide a format description using strftime conventions.

License

This source code of this package is released under the MIT License. Please see the LICENSE for the full content of the license.

Usage

The API if the strftime package is meant to be simple and aligned with the API of the Go standard library time package. It has two functions, Parse() for converting a string into a time.Time using a strftime format string, and Format() for creating a string representation of a time.Time using the provided strftime format string.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"github.com/csotherden/strftime"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	t, _ := strftime.Parse("%a %b  %e %H:%M:%S %Y", "Wed Feb  4 21:00:57 2009")
	fmt.Println(t.Format(time.ANSIC))

	fmt.Println(strftime.Format("%a %b  %e %H:%M:%S %Y", t))
}

Conversion Specifications

This package attempts to comply with the C strftime(3) function closely as reasonably possible. The format specification strings contain special character sequences called conversion specifications. Conversion specifications are prefixed by the % character. At this time all conversion specifications are supported with the exception of modifiers.

Localization

Support for localization is currently mixed. Conversion specifications for individual time fields should be fully localized. However, conversion specifications that map to different timestamps formats depending on locale (for example %c, %x, and %X) only support the en_US localization.