golang RFC2822 conversion - go

Question

Is there a library or function in the included libraries that converts an RFC timestamp to Unix time (or another format that I can then format into Unix time?)
For example, I'd like to change this Tue Sep 16 21:58:58 +0000 2014 to a Unix timestamp.

Answer 1

For example,
package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main() {
s := "Tue Sep 16 21:58:58 +0000 2014"
const rfc2822 = "Mon Jan 02 15:04:05 -0700 2006"
t, err := time.Parse(rfc2822, s)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
return
}
u := t.Unix()
fmt.Println(u)
f := t.Format(time.UnixDate)
fmt.Println(f)
}
Output:
1410904738
Tue Sep 16 21:58:58 +0000 2014
References:
Package time
RFC2822: 3.3. Date and Time Specification
NOTE:
There is a package time format constant named RubyDate; it's a misnomer.
The Go authors were misled by Go Issue 518 which claimed that Ruby Time.now outputs Tue Jan 12 02:52:59 -0800 2010. However,
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
print Time.now
print "\n"
Output:
2014-09-20 19:40:32 -0400
Later, the issue was revised to say that Tue Jan 12 02:52:59 -0800 2010 was the date format used by the Twitter API. In the beginning, in the "Fail Whale" days, Twitter used Ruby-on-Rails, which may be why they assumed it was a Ruby date format.
I didn't use the time.RubyDate constant in my example since it's misleading. A constant named rfc2822 provides better documentation.
References:
Go: Issue 518: time.Parse - numeric time zones and spacing
Diff of format.go revision 0f80c5e80c0e
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