Golang xmltime

Marshal / unmarshal XML element values and attributes in ISO8601/RFC3339 date-time format to xmltime.XMLTime values. xmltime.XMLTime just wraps time.Time:

type XMLTime struct {
    time.Time
}

The library is inspired from this SO question and the answers suggested therein.

To install:

$ go get github.com/wiztools/xmltime

or, if you use dep:

$ dep ensure github.com/wiztools/xmltime

Parsing

Take this example XML:

<root>
  <dt>2006-01-02T15:04:05</dt>
</root>

To unmarshal this XML, a struct like this needs to be defined:

import "encoding/xml"
import "github.com/wiztools/xmltime"

type Root struct {
	XMLName xml.Name `xml:"root"`
	Dt      xmltime.XMLTime  `xml:"dt"`
}

Unmarshaling, and getting a xmltime.XMLTime representation of the data is as simple as:

import "fmt"
import "encoding/xml"

// ...

var d Root
// load XML into byte[] b
err := xml.Unmarshal(b, &d)
// handle error
fmt.Printf("Date: %v.\n", d.Dt)

Refer the xmltime_test.go source code for example.

Empty date-time values

When empty date-time values are encountered in XML, there are two ways to handle it:

1. Unmarshal parse error: This will terminate the XML parsing.
2. Assign a beginning date (since it's NOT possible to assign nil to struct instances in Go).

The default behavior of this library is to error out the parsing, which is the option 1 above. If you want to use the library as described in option 2, you need to set an internal flag to the package:

xmltime.AllowEmptyDateTime()

This is an irreversible call, and a global one. So use it with caution. Once this is set, empty dates will be converted to 0001-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC, hence forth called the beginning date. We also provide a convenience function to validate if a date value is converted to beginning date. Continuing from our example above:

if !d.Dt.isBeginning() {
    // do your stuff!
}