How to parse unix timestamp to time.Time

Question

I'm trying to parse an Unix timestamp but I get out of range error. That doesn't really makes sense to me, because the layout is correct (as in the Go docs):

package main

import "fmt"
import "time"

func main() {
    tm, err := time.Parse("1136239445", "1405544146")
    if err != nil{
        panic(err)
    }

    fmt.Println(tm)
}

Playground

Answer 1

The time.Parse function does not do Unix timestamps. Instead you can use strconv.ParseInt to parse the string to int64 and create the timestamp with time.Unix:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
    "strconv"
)

func main() {
    i, err := strconv.ParseInt("1405544146", 10, 64)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    tm := time.Unix(i, 0)
    fmt.Println(tm)
}

Output:

2014-07-16 20:55:46 +0000 UTC

Playground: http://play.golang.org/p/v_j6UIro7a

Edit:

Changed from strconv.Atoi to strconv.ParseInt to avoid int overflows on 32 bit systems.

Answer 2

you can directly use time.Unix function of time which converts the unix time stamp to UTC

package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "time"
)


func main() {

unixTimeUTC:=time.Unix(1405544146, 0) //gives unix time stamp in utc 

unitTimeInRFC3339 :=unixTimeUTC.Format(time.RFC3339) // converts utc time to RFC3339 format

fmt.Println("unix time stamp in UTC :--->",unixTimeUTC)
fmt.Println("unix time stamp in unitTimeInRFC3339 format :->",unitTimeInRFC3339)

}

Output

unix time stamp in UTC :---> 2014-07-16 20:55:46 +0000 UTC
unix time stamp in unitTimeInRFC3339 format :----> 2014-07-16T20:55:46Z

check in Go Playground : https://play.golang.org/p/5FtRdnkxAd

Answer 3

Sharing a few functions which I created for dates:

Please note that I wanted to get time for a particular location (not just UTC time). If you want UTC time, just remove loc variable and .In(loc) function call.

func GetTimeStamp() string {
     loc, _ := time.LoadLocation("America/Los_Angeles")
     t := time.Now().In(loc)
     return t.Format("20060102150405")
}
func GetTodaysDate() string {
    loc, _ := time.LoadLocation("America/Los_Angeles")
    current_time := time.Now().In(loc)
    return current_time.Format("2006-01-02")
}

func GetTodaysDateTime() string {
    loc, _ := time.LoadLocation("America/Los_Angeles")
    current_time := time.Now().In(loc)
    return current_time.Format("2006-01-02 15:04:05")
}

func GetTodaysDateTimeFormatted() string {
    loc, _ := time.LoadLocation("America/Los_Angeles")
    current_time := time.Now().In(loc)
    return current_time.Format("Jan 2, 2006 at 3:04 PM")
}

func GetTimeStampFromDate(dtformat string) string {
    form := "Jan 2, 2006 at 3:04 PM"
    t2, _ := time.Parse(form, dtformat)
    return t2.Format("20060102150405")
}

Answer 4

Check this repo: https://github.com/araddon/dateparse

You can use

t, err := dateparse.ParseAny(timestampString)

Answer 5

According to the go documentation, Unix returns a local time.

Unix returns the local Time corresponding to the given Unix time

This means the output would depend on the machine your code runs on, which, most often is what you need, but sometimes, you may want to have the value in UTC.

To do so, I adapted the snippet to make it return a time in UTC:

i, err := strconv.ParseInt("1405544146", 10, 64)
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}
tm := time.Unix(i, 0)
fmt.Println(tm.UTC())

This prints on my machine (in CEST)

2014-07-16 20:55:46 +0000 UTC

Answer 6

Just use time.Parse

example:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    fromString := "Wed, 6 Sep 2017 10:43:01 +0300"
    t, e := time.Parse("Mon, _2 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700", fromString)
    if e != nil {
        fmt.Printf("err: %s\n", e)
    }
    fmt.Printf("UTC time: %v\n", t.UTC())
}

Working example on play.golang.org.