Date Practice

Parsing dates is the programmer's equivalent of doing your taxes - you've got to do it, it's fidly and easy to get wrong, and you want it quick and painless.

Previously I'd read package time, got confused by the reference time layout Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006 and fought my way through various StackOverflow Questions. Or used imetakeule/fmtdate.

Hence I wrote these exercises for myself, and I now find Golang's date parsing very logical and easy (excepting some corner cases). Hopefully the exercises will be of use to others. I'm interested in more questions - pull requests welcome.

Contributors

Thanks to the following contributors:

• @oylenshpeegul Tim Heaney, who came back with fixes hours after release

Instructions

git clone https://github.com/soniah/date_practice
go test

Edit dates_test.go until all tests pass.

Many of the dates were printed out using time.Format() with the provided common layout strings. You could of course use these layouts to parse the dates but you wouldn't learn much. Instead write your own layouts.

My answers are in the branch answers but no peeking!

Where the dates don't have timezones they in are in Hong Kong time.

Hints

• when parsing difficult dates you can build up the layout chunk-by-chunk - time.Parse() will print out the remaining unmatched text

• Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 MST 2006 and 01/02 03:04:05PM '06 -0700

Useful Links

• Martynas - Formatting date and time in Golang