Subtracting time.Duration from time in Go

Question

I have a time.Time value obtained from time.Now() and I want to get another time which is exactly 1 month ago.

I know subtracting is possible

Answer 1

There's time.ParseDuration which will happily accept negative durations, as per manual. Otherwise put, there's no need to negate a duration where you can get an exact duration in the first place.

E.g. when you need to substract an hour and a half, you can do that like so:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    now := time.Now()

    fmt.Println("now:", now)

    duration, _ := time.ParseDuration("-1.5h")

    then := now.Add(duration)

    fmt.Println("then:", then)
}

https://play.golang.org/p/63p-T9uFcZo