Formatting time

So far in this chapter, you may have noticed that the dates are pretty ugly. I mean, take a look at the following lines:

The transaction has started at: 2023-09-27 13:50:58.2715452 +0200 CEST m=+0.002992801

These were intentionally left there to force you to think about whether this is all that Go can do. Is there a way to format these lines to make them more convenient and easier to read? If so, what are those extra lines?

Here, we will answer those questions. When we talk about time formatting, there are two main concepts we are referring to. The first option is for instances when we would like our time variable to output a desirable-looking string when we use it in print, and the second option is for when we would like to take a string and parse it to a specific format. Both have their own use cases; we are going to look at them in more detail as I teach you how to use both.

First, we are going to learn about the Parse() function. This function has essentially...