Really strange behaviour of time crate

[bart2]

The below works:

time::macros::format_description!(
"[day]-[month repr:short]-[year repr:last_two] [hour]:[minute]"
),

That one doesn't:

const DATE_FORMAT_STR: &'static str = "[day]-[month repr:short]-[year repr:last_two] [hour]:[minute]";
time::macros::format_description!(
DATE_FORMAT_STR
),

The error I'm getting:
error: expected string.

I've tried to convert it into String but no luck. I do see that the error is saying about some string type not String but still.
Is there anyway to make it work the second example is shown?

[erelde]

I believe this macros actually parses the format string at compile time (similar to format!).

[bjorn3]

Indeed. You have to use time::format_description::parse() if you want to pass a string value rather than a string literal. Unlike time::macros::format_description!() this will return a Result rather than give an error at compile time in case of an invalid format description.

[bart2]

Thanks, that helped!

[steffahn]

If your goal is merely to avoid the need to copy-paste the string literal, and you don’t actually need to parse run-time-generated format strings, you can put the result of the format_description macro call in a const instead, avoiding the run-time overhead of using time::format_description::parse():

const FORMAT: &[time::format_description::FormatItem<'_>] = time::macros::format_description!(
    "[day]-[month repr:short]-[year repr:last_two] [hour]:[minute]"
);

[bart2]

Love it! Thanks!