go - Parsing date/time strings which are not 'standard' formats

Question

How do I parse non-standard date/time strings in Go. In example if I wanted to convert the string 10/15/1983 into a time.Time? The time.Parse() function supposedly allows you to specify a format.

http://play.golang.org/p/v5DbowXt1x

package main

import "fmt"
import "time"

func main() {
    test, err := time.Parse("10/15/1983", "10/15/1983")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    fmt.Println(test)
}

This results in a panic.

panic: parsing time "10/15/1983" as "10/15/1983": cannot parse "" as "0/"

Logically that makes sense because how is it supposed to know which is the day and which is the month.

Other languages have a function similar to the following:

parse("mm/dd/yyyy", "10/15/1983")

I cannot find such a function in the Go docs, is my only choice to regex?

Answer 1

Waitting for answers