How we can read a JSON file with Go Programming Language? - json

I'm working on a translation project on my Angular app. I already create all the different keys for that. I try now to use Go Programming Language to add some functionalities in my translation, to work quickly after.
I try to code a function in Go Programming Language in order to read an input user on the command line. I need to read this input file in order to know if there is missing key inside. This input user must be a JSON file. I have a problem with this function, is blocked at functions.Check(err), in order to debug my function I displayed the different variable with fmt.Printf(variable to display).
I call this function readInput() in my main function.
The readInput() function is the following :
// this function is used to read the user's input on the command line
func readInput() string {
// we create a reader
reader := bufio.NewReader(os.Stdin)
// we read the user's input
answer, err := reader.ReadString('\n')
// we check if any errors have occured while reading
functions.Check(err)
// we trim the "\n" from the answer to only keep the string input by the user
answer = strings.Trim(answer, "\n")
return answer
}
In my main function I call readInput() for a specific command I created. This command line is usefull to update a JSON file and add a missing key automatically.
My func main is :
func main() {
if os.Args[1] == "update-json-from-json" {
fmt.Printf("please enter the name of the json file that will be used to
update the json file:")
jsonFile := readInput()
fmt.Printf("please enter the ISO code of the locale for which you want to update the json file: ")
// we read the user's input
locale := readInput()
// we launch the script
scripts.AddMissingKeysToJsonFromJson(jsonFile, locale)
}
I can give you the command line I use for this code go run mis-t.go update-json-from-json
Do you what I'm missing in my code please ?

Presuming that the file contains dynamic and unknown keys and values, and you cannot model them in your application. Then you can do something like:
func main() {
if os.Args[1] == "update-json-from-json" {
...
jsonFile := readInput()
var jsonKeys interface{}
err := json.Unmarshal(jsonFile, &jsonKeys)
functions.Check(err)
...
}
}
to load the contents into the empty interface, and then use the go reflection library (https://golang.org/pkg/reflect/) to iterate over the fields, find their names and values and update them according to your needs.
The alternative is to Unmarshal into a map[string]string, but that won't cope very well with nested JSON, whereas this might (but I haven't tested it).

Related

Load json file bundled within the executable [duplicate]

I'm working on a small web application in Go that's meant to be used as a tool on a developer's machine to help debug their applications/web services. The interface to the program is a web page that includes not only the HTML but some JavaScript (for functionality), images, and CSS (for styling). I'm planning on open-sourcing this application, so users should be able to run a Makefile, and all the resources will go where they need to go. However, I'd also like to be able to simply distribute an executable with as few files/dependencies as possible. Is there a good way to bundle the HTML/CSS/JS with the executable, so users only have to download and worry about one file?
Right now, in my app, serving a static file looks a little like this:
// called via http.ListenAndServe
func switchboard(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
// snipped dynamic routing...
// look for static resource
uri := r.URL.RequestURI()
if fp, err := os.Open("static" + uri); err == nil {
defer fp.Close()
staticHandler(w, r, fp)
return
}
// snipped blackhole route
}
So it's pretty simple: if the requested file exists in my static directory, invoke the handler, which simply opens the file and tries to set a good Content-Type before serving. My thought was that there's no reason this needs to be based on the real filesystem: if there were compiled resources, I could simply index them by request URI and serve them as such.
Let me know if there's not a good way to do this or I'm barking up the wrong tree by trying to do this. I just figured the end-user would appreciate as few files as possible to manage.
If there are more appropriate tags than go, please feel free to add them or let me know.
Starting with Go 1.16 the go tool has support for embedding static files directly in the executable binary.
You have to import the embed package, and use the //go:embed directive to mark what files you want to embed and into which variable you want to store them.
3 ways to embed a hello.txt file into the executable:
import "embed"
//go:embed hello.txt
var s string
print(s)
//go:embed hello.txt
var b []byte
print(string(b))
//go:embed hello.txt
var f embed.FS
data, _ := f.ReadFile("hello.txt")
print(string(data))
Using the embed.FS type for the variable you can even include multiple files into a variable that will provide a simple file-system interface:
// content holds our static web server content.
//go:embed image/* template/*
//go:embed html/index.html
var content embed.FS
The net/http has support to serve files from a value of embed.FS using http.FS() like this:
http.Handle("/static/", http.StripPrefix("/static/", http.FileServer(http.FS(content))))
The template packages can also parse templates using text/template.ParseFS(), html/template.ParseFS() functions and text/template.Template.ParseFS(), html/template.Template.ParseFS() methods:
template.ParseFS(content, "*.tmpl")
The following of the answer lists your old options (prior to Go 1.16).
Embedding Text Files
If we're talking about text files, they can easily be embedded in the source code itself. Just use the back quotes to declare the string literal like this:
const html = `
<html>
<body>Example embedded HTML content.</body>
</html>
`
// Sending it:
w.Write([]byte(html)) // w is an io.Writer
Optimization tip:
Since most of the times you will only need to write the resource to an io.Writer, you can also store the result of a []byte conversion:
var html = []byte(`
<html><body>Example...</body></html>
`)
// Sending it:
w.Write(html) // w is an io.Writer
Only thing you have to be careful about is that raw string literals cannot contain the back quote character (`). Raw string literals cannot contain sequences (unlike the interpreted string literals), so if the text you want to embed does contain back quotes, you have to break the raw string literal and concatenate back quotes as interpreted string literals, like in this example:
var html = `<p>This is a back quote followed by a dot: ` + "`" + `.</p>`
Performance is not affected, as these concatenations will be executed by the compiler.
Embedding Binary Files
Storing as a byte slice
For binary files (e.g. images) most compact (regarding the resulting native binary) and most efficient would be to have the content of the file as a []byte in your source code. This can be generated by 3rd party toos/libraries like go-bindata.
If you don't want to use a 3rd party library for this, here's a simple code snippet that reads a binary file, and outputs Go source code that declares a variable of type []byte that will be initialized with the exact content of the file:
imgdata, err := ioutil.ReadFile("someimage.png")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Print("var imgdata = []byte{")
for i, v := range imgdata {
if i > 0 {
fmt.Print(", ")
}
fmt.Print(v)
}
fmt.Println("}")
Example output if the file would contain bytes from 0 to 16 (try it on the Go Playground):
var imgdata = []byte{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15}
Storing as base64 string
If the file is not "too large" (most images/icons qualify), there are other viable options too. You can convert the content of the file to a Base64 string and store that in your source code. On application startup (func init()) or when needed, you can decode it to the original []byte content. Go has nice support for Base64 encoding in the encoding/base64 package.
Converting a (binary) file to base64 string is as simple as:
data, err := ioutil.ReadFile("someimage.png")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Println(base64.StdEncoding.EncodeToString(data))
Store the result base64 string in your source code, e.g. as a const.
Decoding it is just one function call:
const imgBase64 = "<insert base64 string here>"
data, err := base64.StdEncoding.DecodeString(imgBase64) // data is of type []byte
Storing as quoted string
More efficient than storing as base64, but may be longer in source code is storing the quoted string literal of the binary data. We can obtain the quoted form of any string using the strconv.Quote() function:
data, err := ioutil.ReadFile("someimage.png")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Println(strconv.Quote(string(data))
For binary data containing values from 0 up to 64 this is how the output would look like (try it on the Go Playground):
"\x00\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\a\b\t\n\v\f\r\x0e\x0f\x10\x11\x12\x13\x14\x15\x16\x17\x18\x19\x1a\x1b\x1c\x1d\x1e\x1f !\"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?"
(Note that strconv.Quote() appends and prepends a quotation mark to it.)
You can directly use this quoted string in your source code, for example:
const imgdata = "\x00\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\a\b\t\n\v\f\r\x0e\x0f\x10\x11\x12\x13\x14\x15\x16\x17\x18\x19\x1a\x1b\x1c\x1d\x1e\x1f !\"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?"
It is ready to use, no need to decode it; the unquoting is done by the Go compiler, at compile time.
You may also store it as a byte slice should you need it like that:
var imgdata = []byte("\x00\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\a\b\t\n\v\f\r\x0e\x0f\x10\x11\x12\x13\x14\x15\x16\x17\x18\x19\x1a\x1b\x1c\x1d\x1e\x1f !\"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?")
The go-bindata package looks like it might be what you're interested in.
https://github.com/go-bindata/go-bindata
It will allow you to convert any static file into a function call that can be embedded in your code and will return a byte slice of the file content when called.
Bundle React application
For example, you have a build output from react like the following:
build/favicon.ico
build/index.html
build/asset-manifest.json
build/static/css/**
build/static/js/**
build/manifest.json
When you use go:embed like this, it will serve the contents as http://localhost:port/build/index.html which is not what we want (unexpected /build).
//go:embed build/*
var static embed.FS
// ...
http.Handle("/", http.FileServer(http.FS(static)))
In fact, we will need to take one more step to make it works as expected by using fs.Sub:
package main
import (
"embed"
"io/fs"
"log"
"net/http"
)
//go:embed build/*
var static embed.FS
func main() {
contentStatic, _ := fs.Sub(static, "build")
http.Handle("/", http.FileServer(http.FS(contentStatic)))
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe("localhost:8080", nil))
}
Now, http://localhost:8080 should serve your web application as expected.
Credit to Amit Mittal.
Note: go:embed requires go 1.16 or higher.
also there is some exotic way - I use maven plugin to build GoLang projects and it allows to use JCP preprocessor to embed binary blocks and text files into sources. In the case code just look like line below (and some example can be found here)
var imageArray = []uint8{/*$binfile("./image.png","uint8[]")$*/}
As a popular alternative to go-bindata mentioned in another answer, mjibson/esc also embeds arbitrary files, but handles directory trees particularly conveniently.

Wrapping json member fields to object

My objective is to add fields to json on user request.
Everything is great, but when displaying the fields with
fmt.Printf("%s: %s\n", content.Date, content.Description)
an error occurs:
invalid character '{' after top-level value
And that is because after adding new fields the file looks like this:
{"Date":"2017-03-20 10:46:48","Description":"new"}
{"Date":"2017-03-20 10:46:51","Description":"new .go"}
The biggest problem is with the writting to file
reminder := &Name{dateString[:19], text} //text - input string
newReminder, _ := json.Marshal(&reminder)
I dont really know how to do this properly
My question is how should I wrap all member fields into one object?
And what is the best way to iterate through member fields?
The code is available here: https://play.golang.org/p/NunV_B6sud
You should store the reminders into an array inside the json file, as mentioned by #Gerben Jacobs, and then, every time you want to add a new reminder to the array you need to read the full contents of rem.json, append the new reminder in Go, truncate the file, and write the new slice into the file. Here's a quick implentation https://play.golang.org/p/UKR91maQF2.
If you have lots of reminders and the process of reading, decoding, encoding, and writing the whole content becomes a pain you could open the file, implement a way to truncate only the last ] from the file contents, and then write only , + new reminder + ].
So after some research, people in the go-nuts group helped me and suggested me to use a streaming json parser that parses items individually.
So I needed to change my reminder listing function:
func listReminders() error {
f, err := os.Open("rem.json")
if err != nil {
return err
}
dec := json.NewDecoder(f)
for {
var content Name
switch dec.Decode(&content) {
case nil:
fmt.Printf("%#v\n", content)
case io.EOF:
return nil
default:
return err
}
}
}
Now everything works the way I wanted.

Why does json.Encoder add an extra line?

json.Encoder seems to behave slightly different than json.Marshal. Specifically it adds a new line at the end of the encoded value. Any idea why is that? It looks like a bug to me.
package main
import "fmt"
import "encoding/json"
import "bytes"
func main() {
var v string
v = "hello"
buf := bytes.NewBuffer(nil)
json.NewEncoder(buf).Encode(v)
b, _ := json.Marshal(&v)
fmt.Printf("%q, %q", buf.Bytes(), b)
}
This outputs
"\"hello\"\n", "\"hello\""
Try it in the Playground
Because they explicitly added a new line character when using Encoder.Encode. Here's the source code to that func, and it actually states it adds a newline character in the documentation (see comment, which is the documentation):
https://golang.org/src/encoding/json/stream.go?s=4272:4319
// Encode writes the JSON encoding of v to the stream,
// followed by a newline character.
//
// See the documentation for Marshal for details about the
// conversion of Go values to JSON.
func (enc *Encoder) Encode(v interface{}) error {
if enc.err != nil {
return enc.err
}
e := newEncodeState()
err := e.marshal(v)
if err != nil {
return err
}
// Terminate each value with a newline.
// This makes the output look a little nicer
// when debugging, and some kind of space
// is required if the encoded value was a number,
// so that the reader knows there aren't more
// digits coming.
e.WriteByte('\n')
if _, err = enc.w.Write(e.Bytes()); err != nil {
enc.err = err
}
encodeStatePool.Put(e)
return err
}
Now, why did the Go developers do it other than "makes the output look a little nice"? One answer:
Streaming
The go json Encoder is optimized for streaming (e.g. MB/GB/PB of json data). It is typical that when streaming you need a way to deliminate when your stream has completed. In the case of Encoder.Encode(), that is a \n newline character. Sure, you can certainly write to a buffer. But you can also write to an io.Writer which would stream the block of v.
This is opposed to the use of json.Marshal which is generally discouraged if your input is from an untrusted (and unknown limited) source (e.g. an ajax POST method to your web service - what if someone posts a 100MB json file?). And, json.Marshal would be a final complete set of json - e.g. you wouldn't expect to concatenate a few 100 Marshal entries together. You'd use Encoder.Encode() for that to build a large set and write to the buffer, stream, file, io.Writer, etc.
Whenever in doubt if it's a bug, I always lookup the source - that's one of the advantages to Go, it's source and compiler is just pure Go. Within [n]vim I use \gb to open the source definition in a browser with my .vimrc settings.
You can erease the newline by backward stream:
f, _ := os.OpenFile(fname, ...)
encoder := json.NewEncoder(f)
encoder.Encode(v)
f.Seek(-1, 1)
f.WriteString("other data ...")
They should let user control this strange behavior:
a build option to disable it
Encoder.SetEOF(eof string)
Encoder.SetIndent(prefix, indent, eof string)
The Encoder writes a stream of documents. The extra whitespace terminates a JSON document in the stream.
A terminator is required for stream readers. Consider a stream containing these JSON documents: 1, 2, 3. Without the extra whitespace, the data on the wire is the sequence of bytes 123. This is a single JSON document with the number 123, not three documents.

How do I do this? Get an struct send to a func as interface and get it back as struct?

I'm new in golang development and have some question regarding something related to this question.
As a learning exercise, I'm trying to create a simple library to handle json based configuration file. As a configuration file to be used for more then one app, it should be able to handle different parameters. Then I have created a type struct Configuration that has the filename and a data interface. Each app will have a struct based on its configuration needs.
In the code bellow, I put all together (lib and "main code") and the "TestData struct" is the "app parameters".
If it doesn't exists, it will set a default values and create the file, and it is working. But when I try to read the file. I try to decode the json and put it back into the data interface. But it is giving me an error and I couldn't figure out how to solve this. Can someone help on this?
[updated] I didn't put the targeted code before, because I though that it would be easier to read in in all as a single program. Bellow is the 'targeted code' for better view of the issue.
As I will not be able to use the TestData struct inside the library, since it will change from program to program, the only way to handle this was using interface. Is there a better way?
library config
package config
import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
"os"
)
// Base configuration struct
type Configuration struct {
Filename string
Data interface{}
}
func (c *Configuration) Create(cData *Configuration) bool {
cFile, err := os.Open(cData.Filename)
defer cFile.Close()
if err == nil {
fmt.Println("Error(1) trying to create a configuration file. File '", cData.Filename, "' may already exist...")
return false
}
cFile, err = os.Create(cData.Filename)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error(2) trying to create a configuration file. File '", cData.Filename, "' may already exist...")
return false
}
buffer, _ := json.MarshalIndent(cData.Data, "", "")
cFile.Write(buffer)
return true
}
func (c *Configuration) Read(cData *Configuration) bool {
cFile, err := os.Open(cData.Filename)
defer cFile.Close()
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error(1) trying to read a configuration file. File '", cData.Filename, "' may not already exist...")
return false
}
jConfig := json.NewDecoder(cFile)
jerr := jConfig.Decode(&cData.Data)
if jerr != nil {
panic(jerr)
}
return true
}
program using library config
package main
import (
"fmt"
"./config"
)
// struct basic para configuração
type TestData struct {
URL string
Port string
}
func main() {
var Config config.Configuration
Config.Filename = "config.json"
if !Config.Read(&Config) {
Config.Data = TestData{"http", "8080"}
Config.Create(&Config)
}
fmt.Println(Config.Data)
TestData1 := &TestData{}
TestData1 = Config.Data.(*TestData) // error, why?
fmt.Println(TestData1.URL)
}
NEW UPDATE:
I have made some changes after JimB comment about I'm not clear about some concepts and I tried to review it. Sure many things aren't clear for me yet unfortunately. The "big" understanding I believe I got, but what mess my mind up is the "ins" and "outs" of values and formats and pointers, mainly when it goes to other libraries. I'm not able yet to follow the "full path" of it.
Yet, I believe I had some improvement on my code.
I think that I have corrected some points, but still have some big questions:
I stopped sending "Configuration" as a parameter as all "data" were already there as they are "thenselfs" in the instance. Right?
Why do I have use reference in the line 58 (Config.Data = &TestData{})
Why to I have to use pointer in the line 64 (tmp := Config.Data.(*TestData)
Why I CANNOT use reference in line 69 (Config.Data = tmp)
Thanks
The reason you are running into an error is because you are trying to decode into an interface{} type. When dealing with JSON objects, they are decoded by the encoding/json package into map[string]interface{} types by default. This is causing the type assertion to fail since the memory structure for a map[string]interface{} is much different than that of a struct.
The better way to do this is to make your TestData struct the expected data format for your Configuration struct:
// Base configuration struct
type Configuration struct {
Filename string
Data *TestData
}
Then when Decoding the file data, the package will unmarshal the data into the fields that match the closest with the data it finds.
If you need more control over the data unmarshaling process, you can dictate which JSON fields get decoded into which struct members by using struct tags. You can read more about the json struct tags available here: https://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/#Marshal
You are trying to assert that Config.Data is of type *TestData, but you're assigning it to TestData{"http", "8080"} above. You can take the address of a composite literal to create a pointer:
Config.Data = &TestData{"http", "8080"}
If your config already exsits, your Read method is going to fill in the Data field with the a default json data type, probably a map[string]interface{}. If you assign a pointer of the correct type to Data first, it will decode into the expected type.
Config.Data = &TestData{}
Ans since Data is an interface{}, you do not want to ever use a pointer to that value, so don't use the & operator when marshaling and unmarshaling.

Parsing complex JSON into goweb REST Create() function

I apologise in advance for a very long question. Hopefully you'll bear with me.
I'm working with the goweb library, and experimenting with the example web app.
I've been trying to modify the RESTful example code, which defines a Thing as:
type Thing struct {
Id string
Text string
}
A Thing is created by sending an HTTP Post request, with an appropriate JSON body, to http://localhost:9090/things. This is handled in the example code in the Create function, specifically the lines:
dataMap := data.(map[string]interface{})
thing := new(Thing)
thing.Id = dataMap["Id"].(string)
thing.Text = dataMap["Text"].(string)
This is all well and good, and I can run the example server (which listens on http://localhost:9090/) and the server operates as expected.
For example:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"Id":"TestId","Text":"TestText"}' http://localhost:9090/things
returns with no error, and then I GET that Thing with
curl http://localhost:9090/things/TestId
and it returns
{"d":{"Id":"TestId","Text":"TestText"},"s":200}
So far, so good.
Now, I would like to modify the Thing type, and add a custom ThingText type, like so:
type ThingText struct {
Title string
Body string
}
type Thing struct {
Id string
Text ThingText
}
This in itself isn't an issue, and I can modify the Create function like so:
thing := new(Thing)
thing.Id = dataMap["Id"].(string)
thing.Text.Title = dataMap["Title"].(string)
thing.Text.Body = dataMap["Body"].(string)
and the run the previous curl POST request with the JSON set to:
{"Id":"TestId","Title":"TestTitle","Title":"TestBody"}
and it returns with no error.
Once again I can GET the Thing URL and it returns:
{"d":{"Id":"TestId","Text":{"Title":"TestTitle","Body":"TestBody"}},"s":200}
Again, so far, so good.
Now, my question:
how do I modify the Create function to allow me to POST complex JSON to it?
For example, that last returned JSON string above includes {"Id":"TestId","Text":{"Title":"TestTitle","Body":"TestBody"}}. I'd like to be able to POST that exact JSON to the endpoint and have the Thing created.
I've followed the code back, and it seems that the data variable is of type Context.RequestData() from https://github.com/stretchr/goweb/context, and the internal Map seems to be of type Object.Map from https://github.com/stretchr/stew/, described as "a map[string]interface{} with additional helpful functionality." in particular, I noticed "Supports dot syntax to set deep values."
I can't work out how I can set up the thing.Text.Title = dataMap... statement so that the correct JSON field is parsed into it. I can't seem to use anything other than string types in the dataMap, and if I try that JSON it gives an error similar to:
http: panic serving 127.0.0.1:59113: interface conversion: interface is nil, not string
Once again, sorry for the ridiculously long question. I really appreciate you reading, and any help you may have to offer. Thanks!
As the JSON package documentation and JSON and Go introduction describe, JSON data can be parsed either generically through interface{} / string maps or unmarshalling directly to the struct types.
The example code you linked to and you based your changes on seems to use the generic string-map approach, dataMap := data.(map[string]interface{}).
As your desired JSON data is an object in an object, it’s simply a map within a map.
So you should be able to
dataMap := data.(map[string]interface{})
subthingMap := dataMap["Text"].(map[string]interface{})
thing.Text.Title = subthingMap["Title"].(string)
thing.Text.Body = subthingMap["Body"].(string)
I’m not sure why that code uses casts and generic types over type-safe unmarshalling directly from JSON to struct types (abstraction I guess). Using the json packages unmarshalling to struct types would go something like
type ThingText struct {
Title string
Body string
}
type Thing struct {
Id string
Text ThingText
}
…
decoder := json.NewDecoder(body)
var thingobj Thing
for {
if err := decoder.Decode(&thingobj); err == io.EOF {
break
} else if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println(thingobj)
}
where body is a io.Reader - in simple/most cases from http.Response.Body.