How to construct time.Time with timezone offset in Go

Question

This is an example date from an Apache log:

[07/Mar/2004:16:47:46 -0800]

I have successfully parsed this into year(int), month(time.Month), day(int), hour(int), minute(int), second(int), and timezone(string).

How can I construct time.Time such that it includes the -0800 time zone offset?

This is what I have so far:

var nativeDate time.Time
nativeDate = time.Date(year, time.Month(month), day, hour, minute, second, 0, ????)

What should I use in place of ????? time.Local or time.UTC is not appropriate here.

Answer 1

You may use time.FixedZone() to construct a time.Location with a fixed offset.

Example:

loc := time.FixedZone("myzone", -8*3600)
nativeDate := time.Date(2019, 2, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, loc)
fmt.Println(nativeDate)

Output (try it on the Go Playground):

2019-02-06 00:00:00 -0800 myzone

If you have the zone offset as a string, you may use time.Parse() to parse it. Use a layout string that only contains the reference zone offset:

t, err := time.Parse("-0700", "-0800")
fmt.Println(t, err)

This outputs (try it on the Go Playground):

0000-01-01 00:00:00 -0800 -0800 <nil>

As you can see, the result time.Time has a zone offset of -0800 hours.

So our original example can also be written as:

t, err := time.Parse("-0700", "-0800")
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}

nativeDate := time.Date(2019, 2, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, t.Location())
fmt.Println(nativeDate)

Output (try it on the Go Playground):

2019-02-06 00:00:00 -0800 -0800