Go - Representing Duration

Problem: You want to specify a duration of time.

Solution: Use the Duration type to represent a span of time.

 

The main representation for a span of time in the time package is, of course, Duration . Duration is nothing fancy, though; it’s just an int64 with some interesting methods. You normally create a Duration like this:

d := 2 * time.Hour

This creates two hours. You can find the pretty form by calling the String method, or if you simply want to print it out to the screen, just do this:

fmt.Println(d)

and you should see this:

2h0m0s

What if you want to create 2 hours, 34 minutes, and 5 seconds? Just add them together, of course (since Duration is just an int64 ):

d := (2 * time.Hour) + (34 * time.Minute) + (5 * time.Second)

If you want to find out the equivalent in minutes, you can do this:

d.Minutes()

Or in seconds, milliseconds, and so on using the respective methods. However, there is no equivalent for anything larger than time.Hour .

func main() {
    d := (2 * time.Hour) + (34 * time.Minute) + (5 * time.Second)
    fmt.Println(d.Hours())
    fmt.Println(d.Minutes())
    fmt.Println(d.Seconds())
    fmt.Println(d.Milliseconds())
}

 

zzh@ZZHPC:/zdata/MyPrograms/Go/study$ go run main.go
2.5680555555555555
154.08333333333334
9245
9245000