time.Time.UnmarshalText() Function in Golang with Examples

In Go language, time packages supplies functionality for determining as well as viewing time. The UnmarshalText() function in Go language is used to implement the encoding.TextUnmarshaler interface. The time here is a quoted-string which is in RFC 3339 format. Moreover, this function is defined under the time package. Here, you need to import the “time” package in order to use these functions.

Syntax:

func (t *Time) UnmarshalText(data []byte) error

Here, “t” is the pointer to the stated time, and “data” is the byte slice that represents the encoding of the form that was generated by MarshalText() method.

Return value: It decodes the encoding that was returned by MarshalText() method and returns an error occurred but if there is no error then “nil” is returned.

Example 1:

// Golang program to illustrate the usage of
// Time.UnmarshalText() function

// Including main package
package main

// Importing fmt and time
import "fmt"
import "time"

// Calling main
func main() {

    // Defining t for MarshalText method
    t := time.Date(2014, 5, 3, 13, 9, 7, 64, time.UTC)

    // Calling MarshalText() method
    encoding, _ := t.MarshalText()

    // Defining tm for UnmarshalText() method
    var tm time.Time

    // Calling UnmarshalText method with its parameters
    decode := tm.UnmarshalText(encoding)

    // Prints output
    fmt.Printf("Error: %v\n", decode)
}

Output:

Error: <nil>

Example 2:

// Golang program to illustrate the usage of
// Time.UnmarshalText() function

// Including main package
package main

// Importing fmt and time
import "fmt"
import "time"

// Calling main
func main() {

    // Defining t for MarshalText method
    t := time.Date(2024, 85, 93, 103, 79, 97, 1264, time.UTC)

    // Calling MarshalText() method
    encoding, _ := t.MarshalText()

    // Defining tm for UnmarshalText() method
    var tm time.Time

    // Calling UnmarshalText method with its parameters
    decode := tm.UnmarshalText(encoding)

    // Prints output
    fmt.Printf("Error: %v\n", decode)
}

Output:

Error: <nil>

Here, the “t” stated in the above code has values that are outside usual range but they are normalized while conversion.