I've written some Go code that wanted to do some simple scanf-like parsing of strings. When I did this, I peered at the fmt package documentation for the Sscanf function and confidently wrote something like the following code:

_, e := fmt.Sscanf(input, "%d:%d", &hr, &min)
if e != nil {
   return ..., e
}

This code has a bug, or perhaps some people would call it an unintended feature (for me it's definitely a bug). Namely, if you feed this code the input string ' 10:15 this is trailing text ', you will not get an error message. Your code will parse the 10:15 part of the input string and silently ignore the rest, or more exactly Sscanf() will.

At this point you might wonder how to either force Sscanf to produce an error on trailing text or detect that you have trailing text. As far as I can tell there is no straightforward way, but there are two options depending on how paranoid you want to be (and where you get your input string from). The simple option is to add an explicit newline to your format string:

_, e := fmt.Sscanf(input, "%d:%d\n", &hr, &min)

This will parse an input string of ' 10:15 ' (with no trailing newline) without raising an error, and will detect most cases of trailing input by raising an error. It won't detect the relatively perverse case of something such as ' 10:15\n and more ', because the ' \n ' in the input matches the expected newline and then Sscanf stops looking.

(At the moment you can stack more than one \n on the end of your format string and still parse a plain ' 10:15 ', so you can add some more caution and/or paranoia if you want. Sufficiently perverse input can always get past you, though, because as far as I can see there is no way to tell Sscanf that what you really mean is an EOF.)

The complicated hack is to add an extra string match to your format string and look at how many items were successfully parsed:

n, _ := fmt.Sscanf(input, "%d:%d%s", &hr, &min, &junk)
if n != 2 {
   return ..., error("Bad input")
}

Among other drawbacks, we have to ignore the error that Sscanf returns; it doesn't tell us whether or not the input was good, and when it has an error value it may be meaningless for our caller.

My suspicion is that in cases like this I am probably pushing Sscanf too far and it's actually the wrong tool for the job. In most cases the right answer is probably matching things with regular expressions so that I can directly say what I mean. Or, in this case, just using time.ParseInLocation even though it's less convenient and I'd have to do a bunch of manipulation on the result.

(Regular expressions are probably slower than Sscanf and I'd have to use strconv to turn the results into numbers, but my code here is not exactly performance critical.)