Golang parse complex json - json

Question

I am new to golang and json and currently struggle to parse the json out from a system.
I've read a couple of blog posts on dynamic json in go and also tried the tools like json2GoStructs
Parsing my json file with this tools just gave me a huge structs which I found a bit messy. Also I had no idea how to get the info im interested in.
So, here are my problems:
How do I get to the info I am interested in?
What is the best approach to parse complex json?
I am only interested into the following 3 json fields:
Name
Guid
Task -> Property -> Name: Error
I'm thankful for every tip, code snippet or explanation!
This is what I got so far (mostly from a tutorial):
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
"io/ioutil"
)
func checkErr(err error) {
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
}
func readFile(filePath string) []byte {
data, err := ioutil.ReadFile(filePath)
checkErr(err)
return data
}
func main() {
path := "/Users/andi/Documents/tmp/wfsJob.json"
data := readFile(path)
var f interface{}
err := json.Unmarshal(data, &f)
checkErr(err)
m := f.(map[string]interface{})
for k, v := range m {
switch vv := v.(type) {
case string:
fmt.Println(k, "is string", vv)
case int:
fmt.Println(k, "is int", vv)
case []interface{}:
fmt.Println(k, "is an array:")
for i, u := range vv {
fmt.Println(i, u)
}
default:
fmt.Println(k, "is of a type I don't know how to handle")
}
}
}

Answer 1

I can offer you this easy way to using JSON in Golang. With this tool you don't need to parse the whole json file, and you can use it without struct.

Answer 2

Gjson is a great solution for fetching a few fields from JSON string. But it may become slow when many (more than 2) fields must be fetched from distinct parts of the JSON, since it re-parses the JSON on each Get call. Additionally, it requires calling gjson.Valid for validating the incoming JSON, since other methods assume the caller provides valid JSON.
There is an alternative package - fastjson. Like gsjon, it is fast and has nice API. Unlike gjson it validates the input JSON and works faster when many unrelated fields must be obtained from the JSON. Here is a sample code for obtaining fields from the original question:
var p fastjson.Parser
v, err := p.ParseBytes(data)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Printf("Name: %s", v.GetStringBytes("Name"))
fmt.Printf("Guid: %s", v.GetStringBytes("Guid"))
fmt.Printf("Error: %s", v.GetStringBytes("Task", "Property", "Name"))