How to create []string from struct in Go

Question

How can I create []string from struct's values in Go? For example, in the following struct:

type Person struct {
    Height    float64
    Weight    float64
    Name    string
    Born    string
}

Tim := Person{174.5, 68.3, "Tim", "United States"}

What I want to get is the following one:

[]string{"174.5", "68.3", "Tim", "United States"}

Since I want to save each record which is derived from the struct to a CSV file, and Write method of the *csv.Writer requires to take the data as []string, I have to convert such struct to []string.

Of course I can define a method on the struct and have it return []string, but I'd like to know a way to avoid calling every field (i.e. person.Height, person.Weight, person.Name...) since the actual data includes much more field.

Thanks.

Darshan Rivka Whittle · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-07 10:04:53Z

3

There may be a simpler and/or more idiomatic way to do it, but what comes to mind for me is to use the reflect package like this:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "reflect"
)

func main() {
    type Person struct {
        Height float64
        Weight float64
        Name   string
        Born   string
    }

    Tim := Person{174.5, 68.3, "Tim", "United States"}

    v := reflect.ValueOf(Tim)

    var ss []string
    for i := 0; i < v.NumField(); i++ {
        ss = append(ss, fmt.Sprintf("%v", v.Field(i).Interface()))
    }

    fmt.Println(ss)
}

edited Sep 7, 2013 at 10:04

answered Sep 7, 2013 at 8:50

Darshan Rivka Whittle

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2 Comments

Blaszard Over a year ago

I was just reading the documentation of the package and trying to define a method, but couldn't succeed. Thanks a lot. The only reason you passed a pointer instead of a value to the reflect.ValueOf method is reflect.Elem() requires only interface or pointer, right?

Darshan Rivka Whittle Over a year ago

@user2360798 Good question. I had overcomplicated that line; I've fixed it now: reflect.ValueOf(Tim) is sufficient.

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