text/scanner is an utf-8 tokenizer, it seems to me that parsing a date is an operation that is much more high level that that; you can already parse dates using time.Parse. I'm not sure a date parser belongs in text/scanner. I'm closing this issue, since I think the problem of parsing a date can already be solved using the time package, but feel free to comment if you want to explain why having one in text/scanner would be better.