How can I parse a time in Go with no period separating seconds and milliseconds?

Question

I'm having to parse times that are in the format:

20060102150405000

E.g. "20170116111621978" represents 16 January 2017, 11:16:21.978. It looks to me like the Go time package requires an embedded period in the date format (05.000) (and hence the input). I can't think of any way short of rewriting the source string to include a period to parse these with time.Parse. Anyone have a suggestion?

Answer 1

Unfortunately the time package requires a period prefix for the fraction seconds part (milliseconds) in the layout, so you have 2 choices:

• either modify the input to insert a period, so you can use the layout 20060102150405.000
• or cut off the last 3 digits, parse the prefix using the layout 20060102150405, parse the milliseconds (e.g. using strconv.Atoi()) and add it to the time using Time.Add().