Hugo: format string as date

[deificx]

I've added an "updated" parameter to some of my posts, it would be nice to format them the same way as I format my date.

And on that note, in posts it could be nice to write dates in ISO 8601 and have them formatted with day and month name. ie. {{ 2014-03-20 | format "Monday, Jan 2, 2006" }}

[spf13]

Should be pretty straightforward to add. See the examples here… https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/master/template/bundle/template.go#L161

You’ll probably need this function as well… https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/master/hugolib/metadata.go#L38

Care to give it a try and make a pull request? Please call it dateFormat instead of format.

The TOML format supports dates natively as well. If you use that it should just work, however I see value in adding this feature.  

If you do write it, please add it to the docs so others know how to use it. The appropriate page is http://hugo.spf13.com/layout/functions

Best,
Steve

-- 
Steve Francia
http://stevefrancia.com
http://spf13.com
http://twitter.com/spf13

From: Even Alander [email protected]
Reply: spf13/hugo [email protected]
Date: March 20, 2014 at 5:07:08 PM
To: spf13/hugo [email protected]
Subject:  [hugo] format string as date (#235)

I've added an "updated" parameter to some of my posts, it would be nice to format them the same way as I format my date.

And on that note, in posts it could be nice to write dates in ISO 8601 and have them formatted with day and month name. ie. {{ 2014-03-20 | format "Monday, Jan 2, 2006" }}

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[anthonyfok]

This issue was recently brought up on the discussion forum:

• Parsing dates in templates: http://discuss.gohugo.io/t/parsing-dates-in-templates/603

[tatsushid]

Interesting. I'll try to write it later (tonight)

[anthonyfok]

For reference: There has been quite a bit of refactoring since @spf13's reply last March, and the links are no longer accessible. Here are the new links.

Should be pretty straightforward to add. See the examples here…
https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/master/template/bundle/template.go#L161

Permalink of the historic file: https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/64572d2d60a6bee0cc0b87dcf0a944d88375d964/template/bundle/template.go#L161

Steve was referring to the template funcMap defined in NewTemplate(). The same but expanded funcMap is now in init() in tpl/template.go:

• https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/master/tpl/template.go#L1245
  (though I am sure this link will be outdated very soon)

You’ll probably need this function as well…
https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/master/hugolib/metadata.go#L38

Permalink of the historic file: https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/2540d884d8d8566caa1cfb71a23f01a746133581/hugolib/metadata.go#L38

Steve was referring to func stringToDate(s string) (time.Time, error) contained therein. This function has been renamed to StringToDate() and now resides in caste.go in "github.com/spf13/cast":

• https://github.com/spf13/cast/blob/master/caste.go#L302

[anthonyfok]

@tatsushid wrote:

Interesting. I'll try to write it later (tonight)

What a pleasant surprise! :+1:

[tatsushid]

Thanks for the reference. It's pretty easy work because of cast library, just I wrote

func DateFormat(layout string, v interface{}) (string, error) {
        t, err := cast.ToTimeE(v)
        if err != nil {
                return "", err
        }
        return t.Format(layout), nil
}

If someone is interested in treating an int value as Unix time value and converting it into a string, I'll send PR to cast library

[anthonyfok]

@tatsushid, great job! Thank you!

Your implementation of dateFormat looks good to me! @deificx's example works with minor modification, i.e. the string needs to be quoted:

{{ "2014-03-20" | dateFormat "Monday, Jan 2, 2006" }}

This works too:

{{ with .Params.startdate }}
    {{ . | dateFormat "Monday, Jan 2, 2006" }}
{{ end }}

What do you think, @spf13 and @bjornerik? This one is slightly beyond my ken, so it would be great if you could do the actual merging. :wink:

Cheers,
Anthony

[bep]

I think it looks exactly as it should be. I can merge this.

[bep]

Merged in 37490ee

[anthonyfok]

:clap:

[rwxrob]

Guys was this always intended to not work with parsing datetime stamps with time? For example, {{ "2014-03-20 05:00PM" | dateFormat "Monday, Jan 2, 2006" }} fails. I have a need for time parsing as well as date and not finding it without a custom filter. Must be something simple. Thanks in advance.

[bep]

@robmuh use http://discuss.gohugo.io/ for questions.