How to represent the RFC-3339 `-00:00` offset in Go? - go

Question

RFC-3339 Section 4.3 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3339#section-4.3) defines the -00:00 offset as the following, which is different than Z or +00:00.
4.3. Unknown Local Offset Convention
If the time in UTC is known, but the offset to local time is unknown,
this can be represented with an offset of "-00:00". This differs
semantically from an offset of "Z" or "+00:00", which imply that UTC
is the preferred reference point for the specified time. RFC2822
[IMAIL-UPDATE] describes a similar convention for email.
However, I'm not sure how to represent this in Go. When I parse a time with -00:00 and format it, I get a Z offset. For example:
Input: 2018-01-01T00:00:00-00:00
Output: 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z
Here's some example code (https://play.golang.org/p/CVmNnhaSiiT):
package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main() {
t := "2018-01-01T00:00:00-00:00"
fmt.Println("Input " + t)
p, err := time.Parse(time.RFC3339, t)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
} else {
t2 := p.Format(time.RFC3339)
fmt.Println("Output " + t2)
}
}

Answer 1

Package time
import "time"
RFC3339, RFC822, RFC822Z, RFC1123, and RFC1123Z are useful for
formatting; when used with time.Parse they do not accept all the time
formats permitted by the RFCs.
Go does not accept all the time formats permitted by the RFCs.
The Go time.Time type uses integers which, unlike floating-point, have no concept of plus and minus zero. The results for parsing offsets of -00:00 and +00:00 are identical.
For example,
package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main() {
var err error
var minus, plus time.Time
t := "2018-01-01T00:00:00-00:00"
minus, err = time.Parse(time.RFC3339, t)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
t = "2018-01-01T00:00:00+00:00"
plus, err = time.Parse(time.RFC3339, t)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
fmt.Println(minus, plus, minus.Equal(plus), minus == plus)
}
Playground: https://play.golang.org/p/Urf8VlKYoMH
Output:
2018-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC 2018-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC true true

Answer 2

PeterSO's answer is perfect IMHO. If you need to act differently based on the information that the offset is unknown, then this might help you.
You can build your own time data type:
type MyTime struct {
// based on time.Time so we can do all normal time.Time stuff
time.Time
offsetUnknown bool
}
func ParseRFC3339(s string) (MyTime, error) {
time, err := time.Parse(time.RFC3339, s)
if err != nil {
return MyTime{}, err
}
return MyTime{
Time: time,
// maybe this condition needs improvement in case of false positives
offsetUnknown: strings.Contains(s, "-00:00"),
}, nil
}
Any functions you need to behave differently based on offsetUnknown you can then override on the MyTime struct. Here one example:
func (s MyTime) Format(layout string) string {
out := s.Time.Format(layout)
// again this is probably not the best solution
if layout == time.RFC3339 && s.offsetUnknown {
out = strings.Replace(out, "+00:00", "-00:00", -1)
}
return out
}