What's the correct way to get a Unix timestamp in Go

Question

What's the correct way to get the Unix timestamp in Go? I thought it would be time.Now().Unix() but it's clearly not.

http://play.golang.org/p/KoJADUDxOS

So time.Now().Unix() tells me the unix timestamp is 1257894000 whereas my browser tells me it is 1398351437. Also www.unixtimestamp.de tells me it is 1398351704 which is what I would expect. Why is the one coming from Go so far off? I get the same results on my local machine btw.

What am I missing?

UPDATE

Ok, turns out it was really only an issue on play.golang.org. I thought I tested it locally as well but I had another look now and yes on my local machine everything is correct.

Answer 1

Unix() does produce a Unix timestap: The number of seconds since the epoch. I think the documentation http://golang.org/pkg/time/#Time.Unix is pretty clear here.

Maybe you are not interested in a Unix timestamp but some human readable time? In that case use Format(): http://golang.org/pkg/time/#Time.Format

And: The playground has only synthetic time. Absolute values on the playground do not correspond to UTC.