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.