Timeconverter

Timeconverter is a simple, cross-platform commandline utility for converting time and date values.

Timeconverter provides support for 30+ standards and formats, as well as two forms of custom format definitions. Timeconverter also supports piping input and output via standard OS pipe chains.

While there are other utilities that provide similar functionality as Timeconverter, the goal for this Timeconverter utility is to provide simple and consistent behavior with a single utility across all common platforms.

Overview

Timeconverter is a commandline utility, which uses a simple commandline structure to read a time value from the commandline using one format, then display that time in another format.

This is the basic structure for converting a time value:

timeconverter timevalue [flags]  

The timevalue argument can be the word now or a time expressed in any of the supported formats.

For example, this command:

timeconverter now -o UnixSecs

will display the current time in Unix seconds format:

Converted Result: 1693668084

And this command:

timeconverter 1693668084 -i UnixSecs -o RFC3339

will read the timevalue in UnixSecs, then convert and display the time in RFC3339 format:

Converted Result: 2023-09-02T10:21:24-05:00

Basically, Timeconverter reads the time value using an input format, then outputs the time using an output format.

Timeconverter supports all standards defined in the Go standard library as of September 2, 2023. It also supports a number of variants of those standards, plus two custom formats (Custom and CustomGO) that allow you to define any format of time and date construction you wish.

Timeconverter flags allow you to set defaults for input and output formats, so that you can use a basic syntax like timeconverter timevalue to convert input values using your default input format, then display them in your default output format.

Timeconverter supports piping input as well, so you can use it in a standard pipe chain like this:

echo 1693668084 | timeconverter -i UnixSecs -o RFC3339

As well as piping outputs like this:

timeconverter 1693668084 -v | cut -c1-10

Status

This utility is still in a phase of ongoing development. It is feature complete at this point, regarding basic expectations of the project. In addition, I have tested it with both general unit testing coverage and manual testing. All time conversion formats are covered with unit tests. I believe it is stable and ready for use.

Nevertheless, there may be bugs, as well as missing or incomplete features. Please test for any specific use-cases you may require. If you do run into issues or have ideas for feature changes, please submit an issue following the instructions in the section Reporting bugs and making feature requests.

I do have a few more features that I want to add. Any breaking changes should follow versioning semantics, unless someone finds a core fault I am not aware of. But since I do not expect anyone would use this code for anything other than the utility itself, I don't expect any dependencies to be affected.

Also, I hope to provide pre-built binaries for the various platforms, with possible installer type functionality as well, for folks that don't want to build the code themselves.

Finally, I will be updating this GitHub project in several ways.

So, expect that there may be possible changes in the future.

Installing

***** Note: I intend to provide more installation options. For now, the following options are available.

Installing from pre-compiled release binaries

You can download a pre-compiled binary or zip from the releases page. There are binaries for Mac, Linux and Windows. Both binaries and archives of the binaries are available there.

Installing remotely from GitHub repo

You use this to install the latest version directly from the repo:

    go install github.com/hobysmith/timeconverter@latest

Installing from the local git repo

Clone the repo. From the root path of the repo, simply run make install. If you do not have the make system installed, you can run go install.

Building a binary for local environment or cross-compiling a build using make

If you want to build a binary for the local environment:

1. Clone this repo to your local environment.
2. From the local repo root path, just run make.

Or, to cross-compile a build for a supported platform, run make [target]. The supported targets are:

• mac-arm64
• mac-amd64
• win-arm64
• win-amd64
• linux-arm64
• linux-amd64

For example, to build a runtime for Linux on ARM64, run:

make linux-arm64    

You can run make list to view a list of supported build targets and options.

Usage

To see standard help info, you can use timeconverter or timeconverter --help or timekeeper help.

To see a list of supported time formats, you can use timeconverter show -o.

The Timeconverter Usage Guide provides detailed instructions on all Timeconverter functionality, including setting local and global defaults, additional commands, custom formats, building for various platforms, etc.

License

Timeconverter uses an MIT license. For license details see License.

You are welcome to use this utility and code as directed in the MIT License. My goal is just to provide tools that I actually use myself, with the hope that someone else may find them useful as well.

Reporting bugs and making feature requests

Please create an Issue for any bugs you find or suggestions you may have relating to Timeconverter functionality. I will try to respond to these as quickly as I can.

When creating issues for bugs, please prefix the title with "Bug:", like "Bug: Blah Blah feature is not working right."

And for feature requests, please prefix the title with "Feature Request:", like "Feature Request: Adding blah blah functionality would make this utility such the major hotness"

Contributing

If you wish to contribute, you may fork and submit pull requests. Please follow this GitHub guide to do so: GitHub: Contributing to Projects

I will try to respond to those as I have time.