Date format toUTCString in Lua

date, lua, luajit, utc

Solution

From the Lua manual:

If format starts with '`!`', then the date is formatted in Coordinated Universal Time. [...]

If format is not "`*t`", then date returns the date as a string, formatted according to the same rules as the ANSI C function `strftime`.

Based on this and a little documentation referencing, it's quite simple to construct a format string that resembles JavaScript's `toUTCString` format.

> =os.date('!%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT')
Fri, 06 Dec 2013 14:27:34 GMT

Problem

I have a question regarding date formatting in Lua (Luajit). I need to get UTC string, for example, like I would do it in JavaScript: ``` var date = new Date() console.log(date.toUTCString()) // "Fri, 06 Dec 2013 14:05:28 GMT" ``` Unfortunately in Lua I cannot find possibility to format date this way: ``` print(os.date()) -- Fri Dec 6 16:06:43 2013 ```

Original source