Surprised by inflexibility of time.Parse wrt 1 or 2 digit months

[David Karr]

I've used "time.Parse()" several times in various small applications, and today I realized a curious inflexibility with it.  If I have to parse date values where the months or days could be either 1 or 2 digits, which is all cases if the code might be dealing with dates anywhere in the year, then I have no choice but to implement a "normalize" function that adds a "0" at the start if the value is not two digits. I got this to work, but anyone who uses this method would have to write the same code. It seems odd that this wouldn't be handled automatically.

[burak serdar]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2025, 10:00 PM David Karr <davidmic...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've used "time.Parse()" several times in various small applications, and today I realized a curious inflexibility with it.  If I have to parse date values where the months or days could be either 1 or 2 digits, which is all cases if the code might be dealing with dates anywhere in the year, then I have no choice but to implement a "normalize" function that adds a "0" at the start if the value is not two digits. I got this to work, but anyone who uses this method would have to write the same code. It seems odd that this wouldn't be handled automatically.

Did you try single digit for day and month in the format?

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[David Karr]

I did. It fails to parse dates with two digits for the month or day.

[burak serdar]

You are right. I thought this worked.

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[Brian Candler]

On Monday, 9 June 2025 at 20:15:52 UTC+1 David Karr wrote:

I did. It fails to parse dates with two digits for the month or day.

Can you show a specific example?? It works for me:

https://go.dev/play/p/hu0q9uInP_h

[David Karr]

Ok, well, after I played with it some more, I realized that a subfield format value of "1" will handle "1", "01", and "11". It's not necessary to use "01" or even "_1".

Sorry for the confusion.