time: support for parsing variable time zones

[subtlepseudonym]

I'm running go1.10 darwin/amd64

What did you do?

I attempted to parse "0800 EST5EDT" using a custom time format "1500 MST7MDT" and only the "EST" portion of the variable timezone was recognized by time.Parse().

What did you expect to see?

A correctly parsed *time.Time type with no errors returned.

What did you see instead?

An error was returned stating that the "5EDT" portion of the variable timezone didn't match the format's "7MDT".

https://play.golang.org/p/hF01Thqr3p6

[andybons]

Can you give a bit more background on the problem you're trying to solve with a custom time format like that? Thank you.

[subtlepseudonym]

I'm scheduling jobs that reoccur daily, but depend upon when the day starts and ends in that timezone. So, I need both time of day and timezone info for each job. The above format would be convenient by allowing me to store both pieces of information succinctly.

[agnivade]

Thanks for the update @subtlepseudonym. I looked into it and it seems that the general recommendation is to use country based timezone names for situations like these. For eg. "America/New_York" is the same as "EST5EDT".

With that, you can load a location and use the In method to get the time in a location. Does that work for you ? I think it's a decent solution which uses the existing tools we have at hand, without adding additional complexity.

[gopherbot]

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