Time formatting in Go

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:

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 #

References #

• gohugohq.com – Hugo dateFormat
• Hugo documentation – dateFormat
• f***inggodateformat