Newbie: help with getting a String from current time

help
#1

I am very new to Rust and learning it, I seem to be hitting a stumbling block.

I need a String with the current time/date.

I can get at the time and date in a numbr of ways. I am able to println!() without problems but I have spent a few hours now trying to get a String or str of the date and or time without success. I have looked at and tried with the crate chrono. I can easily get at the date and time and format it to print on stdout but I am unable to get it in a string for use elsewhere in the program I am trying to write as a first non-trivial one.

My use case is rather simple. I want to use a close approximation of the hours and minutes at which I write a file to use in the file name.

I am trying to reproduce in rust a program I wrote a while ago whilst I was learning golang which I released open sourced and will do the same with the rust version. I am enjoying many aspects of rust, but this is really frustrating me and has cost me heaps of time already. I suspect the issue has to be with ownership and I sort of understand that, but I cannot find a solution, less an idiomatic or elegant one.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

.

#2

Have you tried the format! macro? It works like print! but returns a String.

#3

Using chrono:

use chrono::prelude::*;
let date_as_string = Utc::now().to_string();
#4

Yes, I did try and it seems that format returns a fn and not a String in my case!?

#5

Thanks a lot H2C03!

That did the trick. I simply wasn't aware of the chrono::prelude crate.

#6

Could you share the code? This sounds really strange.

1 Like
#7

either let mystring = format!("{:?}", Utc::now().to_string());
or let myssring: String = format!("{:?}", Utc::now().to_string());

         println!("{}", mystring());

gives me:

error: expected function, found std::string::String
label: std::string::String defined here

#8

You put parenthesis by mistake: mystring()

1 Like
#9

This gives default formatting, but are there are a number of other methods available other than to_string, if something different is needed/preferred:

(Note that Utc::now() returns a DateTime instance, so this is where to look for information about conversion to strings.)

#10

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