golang type conversion in unmarshaljson - go

Question

Could someone help me please what's going wrong here? For some reason the output are not the same and I don't get why.
type rTime time.Time
func (rt *rTime) UnmarshalJSON(data []byte) error {
var s string
if err := json.Unmarshal(data, &s); err != nil {
return err
}
t, err := time.Parse("2006-01-02", s)
if err != nil {
return err
}
log.Println(t)
*rt = rTime(t)
log.Println(*rt)
return nil
}
Log looks like this:
2014/09/18 04:31:35 1999-10-15 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
2014/09/18 04:31:35 {63075542400 0 0x933ea0}
Why's the conversion not working? The input string is 1995-10-15 btw.

Answer 1

The conversion is working, but fmt.Println() looks for a String() method, and that exists on time.Time but not on your type. You should need nothing more than func (rt rTime) String() string { return time.Time(rt).String() } to direct String() calls back to time.Time's implementation.
Here's an example:
package main
import (
"log"
"time"
)
type rTime time.Time
func (rt rTime) String() string { return time.Time(rt).String() }
func main() {
s := "1999-10-15"
t, err := time.Parse("2006-01-02", s)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
log.Println(t)
rt := rTime(t)
log.Println(rt)
}
Note that I treated both time types as values because the standard library does, per the canonical advice to avoid pointers for tiny structs with value semantics.
Maybe more interesting, you can use type embedding to automagically pick up all of the methods of time.Time except any you override. The syntax changes slightly (see on Playground):
package main
import (
"log"
"time"
)
type rTime struct { time.Time }
func main() {
s := "1999-10-15"
t, err := time.Parse("2006-01-02", s)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
log.Println(t)
rt := rTime{t}
log.Println(rt)
}
If you've used embedding and want to write your own custom methods that "proxy through" to the embedded type's, you use a syntax like obj.EmbeddedTypeName.Method, which could be like, for instance, rt.Time.String():
// a custom String method that adds smiley faces
func (rt rTime) String() string { return "😁 " + rt.Time.String() + " 😁" }
obj.EmbeddedTypeName is also how you (for example) access operators on non-struct types that you've embedded.