Creating a struct from array - go

Question

I have an Employee struct which looks like this:
type Employee struct {
firstName string
lastName string
role string
}
I read from an Excel file a row, which has the corresponding columns in the same order.
From the excel file I created an array that holds this data, so the array looks like this:
[personFirstName, personLastName, personRole]
And I want to initialize my Employee struct with it.
But I can't figure out how, because I can't iterate over the Employee struct like it's an array.
I thought about doing it manually, like this:
e := {
firstName: array[0],
lastName: array[1],
role: array[2],
}
But I guess there should be a better way.
Any Ideas?

Answer 1

There's nothing wrong with the code in the question. Here's how to use the reflect API to accomplish the goal:
Export the field to make the fields settable through the reflect API.
type Employee struct {
FirstName string
LastName string
Role string
}
Create reflect value for an employee. The & and Elem()
shenanigans are required to get a settable value.
var e Employee
v := reflect.ValueOf(&e).Elem()
For each field, set the string:
for i := 0; i < v.NumField(); i++ {
v.Field(i).SetString(values[i])
}
Run an example on the Go Playground.
Put the code in a function if you need it in more than one place:
// setStrings sets the fields of the struct pointed
// to by ptr to the specified values.
func setStrings(ptr interface{}, values []string) {
v := reflect.ValueOf(ptr).Elem()
for i := 0; i < v.NumField(); i++ {
v.Field(i).SetString(values[i])
}
}
Call it like this:
values := []string{"Monica", "Smith", "Manager"}
var e Employee
setStrings(&e, values)
fmt.Printf("%+v\n", e) // prints {FirstName:Monica LastName:Smith Role:Manager}
Run an example on the playground.