locale for time functions

[make-github-pseudonymous-again]

Is it currently possible to format dates in, say, French, instead of English?

[hairyhenderson]

Hi @aureooms, thanks for logging this issue! Unfortunately right now gomplate just wraps Go's time package, which currently does not support any sort of localization.

However, there is a wrapper project https://github.com/goodsign/monday/ which I could add support for specifically translating dates & times.

Can I get some more information about your use case?

Are you wanting to be able to specify the language/locale in which to format the date, and/or are you wanting to have gomplate respect the LANG and LC_TIME environment variables?

[make-github-pseudonymous-again]

Well I guess usually you would want a single language per document so environment variables would be perfect. That is my use case. But we are never sure one day someone will want to format dates in different languages in the same document.

[hairyhenderson]

Ok, thanks. Environment variables are easier to support, since they don't involve changing or adding function signatures 😉

[github-actions]

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[hairyhenderson]

@gedw99 No, this never got implemented. Can you elaborate on your use-case?

[hairyhenderson]

Thanks @gedw99.

In the very simple case of converting time zones, that's already supported with functions like time.ParseInLocation, and converting from some timezone to UTC can be done with the UTC function on the parsed time.Time value.

For converting from UTC to local time you can use Local, which uses the TZ environment variable to inform which zone to use.

Anyway, that brings us back to locale-specific formatting, which is of course not yet supported.

I'd be willing to review a PR to add support for it, but I don't have the bandwidth to work on it myself right now.