I have two dates like this, I would like to compare only the dates, ignoring the time. Currently I have this:
package main
import (
"time"
//"fmt"
)
func main() {
a, _ := time.Parse(time.RFC3339, "2017-02-01T12:00:00+00:00")
b, _ := time.Parse(time.RFC3339, "2017-02-11T14:30:00+00:00")
x := b.Sub(a)
println(int(x.Hours()))
}
Which prints 242
. That is correct, but what I actually want to do is compare the dates like this:
a, _ := time.Parse(time.RFC3339, "2017-02-01T00:00:00+00:00")
b, _ := time.Parse(time.RFC3339, "2017-02-11T00:00:00+00:00")
Notice: minutes/hours/seconds have been set to zero - the diff will now be 240 hours.
I couldn't really figure out how to do this, is there a time.SetTime(0, 0, 0)
function in Go that I missed or what's the canonical way to reset the time for a date?
You could Truncate
the times to make them round to a multiple of a day.
In your example:
oneDay := 24 * time.Hour
a = a.Truncate(oneDay)
b = b.Truncate(oneDay)
Find a playground with the adapted code here: https://play.golang.org/p/yWIYt3UkiT
You have to be rather careful handling dates if using time.Time because there can be edge cases around the beginning and ending of daylight savings.
Shameless plug: I wrote a Date package (actually it was derived from someone else's earlier work) to deal with dates without incurring the DST issues.
https://github.com/rickb777/date
You can do, for example,
a := date.New(2017, 2, 1)
b := date.New(2017, 2, 11)
daysDifference := b.Sub(a)
fmt.Println(daysDifference)
There are other sub-packages to handle date ranges, timespans, ISO8601 periods and clock-face time.