Comment 1:

Strftime is a kitchen sink, a bad interface: no one remembers
all the letters, so the only way to use it is with documentation
in hand.  At that point you might as well write the longer but
more readable fmt.Sprintf equivalent.
I intentionally hid time.format in favor of a small collection
of commonly-used time formats.  If there is a missing format,
I'd rather add it than expose time.format.

Owner changed to r...@golang.org.

Comment 2 by sionide21:

I agree that Strftime is kind of a pain but it would be nice to have the
compatibility with preexisting languages. It would be much easier to port preexisting
code if you could just copy your time formats over.

Comment 3:

Rob added time.Format instead.

Status changed to WorkingAsIntended.

Comment 4 by crquan:

no, I don't agree strftime is bad, it actually provides same way as date command, then
it's easier to write code as same as shell (call date) and python, I hope this can be
available in Go as well, the date command exists in Unix for decades, why Go language
not willing to provide the same convenience?
date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S'
time.strftime('%Y%m%d-%H%M%S')

Comment 5:

This issue has been closed for over 4 years. The format that the time package is not
going to change in the life of Go 1.

Comment 6 by crquan:

and the time.Format is buggy if I tried to use layout like this: (in Asia culture, we
don't assume people know the the months' English name, so we use all numbers)
        const layout = "20140714-030001"
        fmt.Println(time.Now().Format(layout))
it prints like 180730773-090007, what's the hell of this?
especially in logging functionality, I want to print current time in this format prepend
to every output line, I think the time.Format needs to guess what numbers mean in the
layout string every time, do you think is that efficient?

Comment 7:

It's not buggy and your supposition is wrong. The layout is defined for a specific time,
not any old time. This property is well explained in the documentation. The layout
string you want is
const layout = "20060102-150405"
http://play.golang.org/p/tPjLQd4k14
The issue remains closed and perhaps should have comments disabled.

Comment 8:

The package is not buggy, it works as explained in the documentation, using a format
string that is set to a specific, standard time. Your layout string is wrong; use this:
const layout = "20060102-150405"
http://play.golang.org/p/tPjLQd4k14
The issue remains closed and should perhaps have comments disabled.

Comment 9:

Labels changed: added restrict-addissuecomment-commit.