Convert io.ReadCloser to a String

Jun 10, 2016 · 104 words · 1 minute read #buffer #bytes #closer #get #io #read #string #readcloser #convert

Net/http is an amazing package but there are times you need to work with the body text of the response returned from the call you just made. Many functions require a string as input so we have to convert it first by passing it through a buffer.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
    "bytes"
)

func main() {
    response, _ := http.Get("https://golangcode.com/")

    // The line below would fail because Body = io.ReadCloser
    // fmt.Printf(response.Body)

    // ...so we convert it to a string by passing it through 
    // a buffer first. A 'costly' but useful process.
    buf := new(bytes.Buffer)
    buf.ReadFrom(response.Body)
    newStr := buf.String()

    fmt.Printf(newStr)
}

Sorting an Array of Numbered String Values – Aug 10, 2018
This is an issue in programming when numbers are stored as strings - because as strings, when sorted alphabetically they will go by each digit, from first to last. You might encounter this problem when dealing with numbered file names, for example, which will be treated as strings but we might need to process them in order. In our example below we use both the sort and strconv packages to sort the array and convert the strings to numbers within our comparison function.
Creating & Writing to Temp Files – Jul 6, 2018
We programmers often use temporary files and this example shows how we can create and write to one. We used the ioutil package which has functions for just this. The TempFile() accepts a folder and a prefix. As the folder we get the os’ temp directory (which would be /tmp on unix systems) and for the prefix we use a string, but if we don’t want one, we just pass an empty string.
HTTP Get with Timeout – Jun 20, 2018
We’ve already covered how to download a file, but this post covers it a little further by specifying the maximum time attempted on the request. Adding timeouts are often important to stop your program coming to a halt. To do this we make our own http client, giving it our custom timeout value. We can then use this client to make our requests. If a timeout is reached, the Get() function will return with an error.

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Author: Edd Turtle

Edd is the Lead Developer at Hoowla, a prop-tech startup, where he spends much of his time working on production-ready Go and PHP code.

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