Override the layout used by json.Marshal to format time.Time

Question

In Golang, is there a way to make the generic encoding/json Marshal to use a different layout when Marshaling the time.Time fields?

Basical

Answer 1

As inspired by zeebo's answer and hashed out in the comments to that answer:

http://play.golang.org/p/pUCBUgrjZC

package main

import "fmt"
import "time"
import "encoding/json"

type jsonTime struct {
    time.Time
    f string
}

func (j jsonTime) format() string {
    return j.Time.Format(j.f)
}

func (j jsonTime) MarshalText() ([]byte, error) {
    return []byte(j.format()), nil
}

func (j jsonTime) MarshalJSON() ([]byte, error) {
    return []byte(`"` + j.format() + `"`), nil
}

func main() {
    jt := jsonTime{time.Now(), time.Kitchen}
    if jt.Before(time.Now().AddDate(0, 0, 1)) { // 1
        x := map[string]interface{}{
            "foo": jt,
            "bar": "baz",
        }
        data, err := json.Marshal(x)
        if err != nil {
            panic(err)
        }
        fmt.Printf("%s", data)
    }
}

This solution embeds the time.Time into the jsonTime struct. Embedding promotes all of time.Time's methods to the jsonTime struct, allowing their use without explicit type conversion (see // 1).

Embedding a time.Time has the downside of also promoting the MarshalJSON method, which the encoding/json marshaling code prioritizes higher than the MarshalText method for backwards compatibility reasons (MarshalText was added in Go 1.2, MarshalJSON predates that). As a result the default time.Time format is used instead of a custom format provided by MarshalText.

To overcome this problem we override MarshalJSON for the jsonTime struct.