Read extern JSON file - json

Question

I am trying to read the following JSON file:
{
"a":1,
"b":2,
"c":3
}
I have tried this but I found that I had to write each field of the JSON file into a struct but I really don't want to have all my JSON file in my Go code.
import (
"fmt"
"encoding/json"
"io/ioutil"
)
type Data struct {
A string `json:"a"`
B string `json:"b"`
C string `json:"c"`
}
func main() {
file, _ := ioutil.ReadFile("/path/to/file.json")
data := Data{}
if err := json.Unmarshal(file ,&data); err != nil {
panic(err)
}
for _, letter := range data.Letter {
fmt.Println(letter)
}
}
Is there a way to bypass this thing with something like json.load(file) in Python?

Answer 1

If you only want to support integer values, you could unmarshal your data into a map[string]int. Note that the order of a map is not defined, so the below program's output is non-deterministic for the input.
package main
import (
"fmt"
"encoding/json"
"io/ioutil"
)
func main() {
file, _ := ioutil.ReadFile("/path/to/file.json")
var data map[string]int
if err := json.Unmarshal(file ,&data); err != nil {
panic(err)
}
for letter := range data {
fmt.Println(letter)
}
}

Answer 2

You can unmarshal any JSON data in this way:
var data interface{}
if err := json.Unmarshal(..., &data); err != nil {
// handle error
}
Though, in this way you should handle all the reflection-related stuffs
since you don't know what type the root data is, and its fields.
Even worse, your data might not be map at all.
It can be any valid JSON data type like array, string, integer, etc.
Here's a playground link: https://play.golang.org/p/DiceOv4sATO

Answer 3

It's impossible to do anything as simple as in Python, because Go is strictly typed, so it's necessary to pass your target into the unmarshal function.
What you've written could otherwise be shortened, slightly, to something like this:
func UnmarshalJSONFile(path string, i interface{}) error {
f, err := os.Open(path)
if err != nil {
return err
}
defer f.Close()
return json.NewDecoder(f).Decode(i)
}
But then to use it, you would do this:
func main() {
data := Data{}
if err := UnmarshalJSONFile("/path/to/file.json", &data); err != nil {
panic(err)
}
}
But you can see that the UnmarshalJSONFile is so simple, it hardly warrants a standard library function.