Handling time in Haskell

Jan 19, 2022

Haskell’s method of handling time may be a bit confusing for those first reading about it. I know I spent some time trying to figure it out.

As a C programmer, you may be used to strftime and its related structs and functions.

It seems like all the articles on the internet don’t actually explain how to use something similar to strftime in Haskell.

Getting the time is rather easy, but the functions have different names than we may be used to. For example:

import Data.Time

getTime :: IO String
getTime = do
    -- getZonedTime for current timezone, as
    -- getCurrentTime may be inaccurate
    now <- getZonedTime
    return $ formatTime defaultTimeLocale "%I:%M:%S" now

main = do
    time <- getTime
    putStrLn time

The format used is the same as strftime, so you can simply read the manual page to learn how to format time the way you’d like.