Finding today's date

Obtaining the current date is a very common task for any system or application. Let's look at how this is done with help of Go's standard library.

How to do it...

1. Open the console and create the folder chapter04/recipe01.
2. Navigate to the directory.
3. Create the today.go file with the following content:

        package main

        import (
          "fmt"
          "time"
        )

        func main() {
          today := time.Now()
          fmt.Println(today)
        }

4. Execute the code by running go run today.go in the main Terminal.
5. You will see the following output:

How it works...

The built-in package time contains the function Now, which provides the instance of a Time initialized to the current local time and date.

The Time type is an instant in time in nanoseconds. The zero value of Time is January 1, year 1, 00:00:00.000000000 UTC.

Note

The pointer to the Time type should not be used. If only the value (not pointer to variable) is used, the Time instance is considered to...