Say you have a custom type defined like this:
type User struct {
id int
email string
age int
married bool
}Using the encoding/json package from the standard library to serialise an instance of a User would look something like this:
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
)
func main() {
u := User{1, "[email protected]", 33, true}
uJSON, err := json.Marshal(u)
if err != nil {
fmt.Printf("Something went wrong: %s\n", err)
} else {
fmt.Printf("json: %s\n", uJSON)
}
}If we run that in console we will get this output:
$ go run example.go
json: {}Why are we getting an empty JSON? The answer is simple: Go can’t access the fields id, email, age and married because they are not accessible from outside of the current scope (a.k.a. they are private). To make them public, the fields must start with an uppercase letter. Let’s see:
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
)
type User struct {
Id int
Email string
Age int
Married bool
}
func main() {
u := User{1,"[email protected]",27,true}
uJSON, err := json.Marshal(u)
if err != nil {
fmt.Printf("Something went wrong: %s\n", err)
} else {
fmt.Printf("json: %s\n", uJSON)
}
}If we run that again in console we would get now an output like this:
$ go run example.go
json: {"Id":1,"Email":"[email protected]","Age":27,"Married":true}That looks more like it. But there is this thing that doesn’t make me feel very
comfortable: the key names in my JSON object start also with an uppercase letter :/
Don’t get me wrong: CamelCase is ok but not in my JSONs. Fortunately, Go offers a
workaround for this:
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
)
type User struct {
Id int `json:"id"`
Email string `json:"email"`
Age int `json:"age"`
Married bool `json:"married"`
}
func main() {
u := User{1,"[email protected]",27,true}
uJSON, err := json.Marshal(u)
if err != nil {
fmt.Printf("Something went wrong: %s\n", err)
} else {
fmt.Printf("json: %s\n", uJSON)
}
}Let’s run that again in console to see what’s up:
$ go run example.go
json: {"id":1,"email":"[email protected]","age":27,"married":true}Daaaaaayyyummm, that’s what I’m talking about (read that with robot accent). You see? It’s not as bad as we thought it would be. There are a couple more options that we can set for our fields when serialising them into JSON that they mention on the official documentation. You can check them out here.