Hugoformat on A Scripter's NotesEmacs, scripting and anything text oriented.2026-04-22T08:24:58-04:00Kaushal Modikaushal.modi@gmail.comhttps://scripter.co/tags/format/Time formatting in Gohttps://scripter.co/time-formatting-in-go/Kaushal Modi2018-06-12T12:21:00-04:002018-06-12T12:21:00-04:00A little cheat sheet to help remember the Go time formatting syntax.
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Today on Hugo Discourse, I came across the – Why “2006”? – question regarding the use of {{ now.Format "2006" }} in Hugo template. That template simply prints the current year i.e. the time when that template was rendered by Hugo.

As I was answering that, I thought that this was a good time to document this for myself too.. and thus this post.

Time.Format Syntax #

Hugo uses the Go Time.Format method1 for formatting date and time strings. But that format specification uses a strange syntax — You need to associate 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 with date elements as follows:

Table 1: Cryptic dates used for Go Time.Format
Number Field Strings Meaning
1 01 (with optional leading zero), 1, Jan, January month
2 02 (with optional leading zero), 2, Mon, Monday day
3 03 (with optional leading zero), 3, 15 hour
4 04 (with optional leading zero), 4 minute
5 05 (with optional leading zero), 5 seconds
6 06, 2006 year
-7 -0700, -07:00, -07, MST timezone
n/a PM (not AM) AM or PM (uppercase)
n/a pm (not am) am or pm (lowercase)
n/a anything else shows up as it is

You can visualize a formatting string "Jan 2 15:04:05 2006 MST" as below:

Jan 2 15:04:05 2006 MST
  1 2  3  4  5    6  -7

Hugo’s dateFormat #

The dateFormat accepts a date/time format using the same syntax.

Here is the signature of that function:

dateFormat "<FORMAT_STRING>" "<DATE_RFC3339>"
  • The <FORMAT_STRING> uses one or more date/time fields as shown in the “Field Strings” column in Table 1. Few examples:
    • “Jan 2 15:04:05 2006 MST”
    • “2006-01-02”
    • “Jan 2, Mon”
    • “It’s 3 O’clock”
  • The <DATE_RFC3339> is a date string compatible with RFC3339. Few example valid date strings:
    • “2017-07-31”
    • “2017-07-31T17:05:38”
    • “2017-07-31T17:05:38Z”
    • “2017-07-31T17:05:38+04:00”
    • “2017-07-31T17:05:38-04:00”

Ordinal dates #

In addition, humanize can be used to generate ordinal date, like “1st”, “2nd”, “3rd”, ..

Examples #

The time string "2018-06-13T11:30:00-04:00" (RFC3339 format) can be output in different formats:

Go Formatting string Output
"Jan 2 15:04:05 2006 MST""Jun 13 11:30:00 2018 EDT"
"2006-01-02 03:04pm Monday""2018-06-13 11:30am Wednesday"
"Jan 2, Mon""Jun 13, Wed"
"It's 3 O'clock""It's 11 O'clock"
Below shows examples of printing ordinal dates using a combination of ((dateFormat "2" $dt) | humanize) and (dateFormat "of January" $dt):

Date ($dt) Output
2018-06-01"1st of June"
2018-06-02"2nd of June"
2018-06-03"3rd of June"
2018-06-04"4th of June"
2018-06-10"10th of June"

References #

  1. I am not a Go dev.. let me know if the correct term for that is a “function” or a “method” in Go 😄. Update <2018-11-08 Thu>: Thanks to Mendy in comments, I have now fixed referencing Time.Format as a method. ↩︎

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