Subtracting time.Duration from time in Go

Question

I have a time.Time value obtained from time.Now() and I want to get another time which is exactly 1 month ago.

I know subtracting is possible

Answer 1

Try AddDate:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    now := time.Now()

    fmt.Println("now:", now)

    then := now.AddDate(0, -1, 0)

    fmt.Println("then:", then)
}

Produces:

now: 2009-11-10 23:00:00 +0000 UTC
then: 2009-10-10 23:00:00 +0000 UTC

Playground: http://play.golang.org/p/QChq02kisT

Answer 2

You can negate a time.Duration:

then := now.Add(- dur)

You can even compare a time.Duration against 0:

if dur > 0 {
    dur = - dur
}

then := now.Add(dur)

You can see a working example at http://play.golang.org/p/ml7svlL4eW

Answer 3

There's time.ParseDuration which will happily accept negative durations, as per manual. Otherwise put, there's no need to negate a duration where you can get an exact duration in the first place.

E.g. when you need to substract an hour and a half, you can do that like so:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    now := time.Now()

    fmt.Println("now:", now)

    duration, _ := time.ParseDuration("-1.5h")

    then := now.Add(duration)

    fmt.Println("then:", then)
}

https://play.golang.org/p/63p-T9uFcZo

Answer 4

In response to Thomas Browne's comment, because lnmx's answer only works for subtracting a date, here is a modification of his code that works for subtracting time from a time.Time type.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    now := time.Now()

    fmt.Println("now:", now)

    count := 10
    then := now.Add(time.Duration(-count) * time.Minute)
    // if we had fix number of units to subtract, we can use following line instead fo above 2 lines. It does type convertion automatically.
    // then := now.Add(-10 * time.Minute)
    fmt.Println("10 minutes ago:", then)
}

Produces:

now: 2009-11-10 23:00:00 +0000 UTC
10 minutes ago: 2009-11-10 22:50:00 +0000 UTC

Not to mention, you can also use time.Hour or time.Second instead of time.Minute as per your needs.

Playground: https://play.golang.org/p/DzzH4SA3izp