I know this has been asked a few times, but I don't see one that matches my need to support NULL values. I have fields that are optional in a DB. I need to output data in JSON format that includes these potentially NULL fields, which I would like to omit from the JSON if they are still NULL. I can change to some other default value other than NULL, but I haven't found one that works. I'm storing JSON arrays in JSON format (longtext) in MariaDB. Here's my code that fails (Playground link):
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
)
var respBytes = []byte("")
// Example data [12345, 23456, 34567]
func main() {
var jsonData []interface{}
err := json.Unmarshal(respBytes, &jsonData)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
fmt.Println(jsonData)
}
Replace respBytes empty string with example data and it works. Example data is simple JSON number array such as: "[12345, 23456, 34567]". How can I get it to work with data and without?
How can I get it to work with data and without?
Unfortunately, you can't, with the standard library json package. It validates the JSON input before (while) decoding it, and an empty string is not valid JSON, so it will err before you even have a chance to decode with a custom unmarshaler.
In this particular case, the only real option is to check for valid input first. Of course, you can do this with a wrapping function if you want:
func myUnmarshal(input []byte, target interface{}) error {
if len(input) == 0 {
return nil
}
return json.Unmarshal(input, target)
}
Related
I have a file with serialized array in PHP.
The content of the file locks like this
a:2:{i:250;s:7:"my_catz";s:7:"abcd.jp";a:2:{s:11:"category_id";i:250;s:13:"category_name";s:7:"my_catz";}}
The array unserialized is this
(
[250] => my_catz
[abcd.jp] => Array
(
[category_id] => 250
[category_name] => my_catz
)
)
Now, i want to get the content of the file in GO, unserialize it convert it to an array.
In GO i can get the content of the file using
dat, err := os.ReadFile("/etc/squid3/compiled-categories.db")
if err != nil {
if e.Debug {
log.Printf("error reading /etc/squid3/compiled-categories.db: ", err)
}
}
And unserialized it using github.com/techoner/gophp library
package categorization
import (
"fmt"
"os"
"github.com/techoner/gophp"
"log"
"errors"
)
type Data struct {
Website string
Debug bool
}
func (e Data) CheckPersonalCategories() (int,string) {
if e.Debug {
log.Printf("Checking Personal Categories")
}
if _, err := os.Stat("/etc/squid3/compiled-categories.db"); errors.Is(err, os.ErrNotExist) {
if e.Debug {
log.Printf("/etc/squid3/compiled-categories.db not exit: ", err)
}
return 0,""
}
dat, err := os.ReadFile("/etc/squid3/compiled-categories.db")
if err != nil {
if e.Debug {
log.Printf("error reading /etc/squid3/compiled-categories.db: ", err)
}
}
out, _ := gophp.Unserialize(dat)
fmt.Println(out["abcd.jp"])
return 0,""
}
But I can't access to the array, for example, when I try access to array key using out["abcd.jp"] i get this error message
invalid operation: out["abcd.jp"] (type interface {} does not support indexing)
The result of out is
map[250:my_catz abcd.jp:map[category_id:250 category_name:my_catz]]
Seams that is unserializing
Don't make assumptions about what is and isn't succeeding in your code. Error responses are the only reliable way to know whether a function succeeded. In this case the assumption may hold, but ignoring errors is always a mistake. Invest time in catching errors and at least panic them - don't instead waste your time ignoring errors and then trying to debug unreliable code.
invalid operation: out["abcd.jp"] (type interface {} does not support indexing)
The package you're using unfortunately doesn't provide any documentation so you have to read the source to understand that gophp.Unserialize returns (interface{}, error). This makes sense; php can serialize any value, so Unserialize must be able to return any value.
out is therefore an interface{} whose underlying value depends on the data. To turn an interface{} into a particular value requires a type assertion. In this case, we think the underlying data should be map[string]interface{}. So we need to do a type assertion:
mout, ok := out.(map[string]interface{})
Before we get to the working code, one more point I'd like you to think about. Look at the code below: I started it from your code, but the resemblance is very slight. I took out almost all the code because it was completely irrelevant to your question. I added the input data to the code to make a minimal reproduction of your code (as I asked you to do and you declined to do). This is a very good use of your time for 2 reasons: first, it makes it a lot easier to get answers (both because it shows sufficient effort on your part and because it simplifies the description of the problem), and second, because it's excellent practice for debugging. I make minimal reproductions of code flows all the time to better understand how to do things.
You'll notice you can run this code now without any additional effort. That's the right way to provide a minimal reproducible example - not with a chunk of mostly irrelevant code which still can't be executed by anybody.
The Go Plaground is a great way to demonstrate go-specific code that others can execute and investigate. You can also see the code below at https://go.dev/play/p/QfCl08Gx53e
package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/techoner/gophp"
)
type Data struct {
Website string
Debug bool
}
func main() {
var dat = []byte(`a:2:{i:250;s:7:"my_catz";s:7:"abcd.jp";a:2:{s:11:"category_id";i:250;s:13:"category_name";s:7:"my_catz";}}`)
out, err := gophp.Unserialize(dat)
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
if mout, ok := out.(map[string]interface{}); ok {
fmt.Println(mout["abcd.jp"])
}
}
I have the following requirement: return errors from a REST API in the following format:
Error format
422
{
"name-of-field": [
"can't be blank",
"is too silly"
]
}
My code looks like this:
var PostFeedback = func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
params := mux.Vars(r)
surveyId := params["id"]
feedback := &models.Feedback{}
err := json.NewDecoder(r.Body).Decode(feedback)
if err != nil {
jsonError := fmt.Sprintf(`{
"%s": [
"%s"
]
}`, "errors", err)
log.Printf("invalid input format, %v", jsonError)
resp := map[string]interface{}{"error": jsonError}
u.Respond(w, resp)
return
}
Questions:
How do I get the names of the offending fields?
How do I satisfy the requirement best?
The encoding/json package doesn't provide validation for "blank", nor "silly" values. It will return an error only if the data in the body is not a valid json, or if the field types in the json do not, according to the package's spec, match the field types of the structure into which you're trying to decode that json.
The 1st type of error would be the json.SyntaxError, if you get this it is not always possible to satisfy your requirements since there may be no actual fields which you could use in your response, or if there are json fields, they, and their values, may be perfectly valid json, but the cause of the error may lie elsewhere (see example).
In cases where the data holds actual json fields but it has, for example, non-json values you could use the Offset field of the SyntaxError type to find the closest preceding field in the data stream. Using strings.LastIndex you can implement a naive solution to look backwards for the field.
data := []byte(`{"foobar": i'm not json}`)
err := json.Unmarshal(data, &T{})
se, ok := err.(*json.SyntaxError)
if !ok {
panic(err)
}
field := string(data[:se.Offset])
if i := strings.LastIndex(field, `":`); i >= 0 {
field = field[:i]
if j := strings.LastIndex(field, `"`); j >= 0 {
field = field[j+1:]
}
}
fmt.Println(field) // outputs foobar
Playground link
NOTE: As you can see, for you to be able to look for the field, you need to have access to the data, but when you're using json.NewDecoder and passing it the request's body directly, without first storing its contents somewhere, you'll loose access to that data once the decoder's Decode method is done. This is because the body is a stream of bytes wrapped in a io.ReadCloser that does not support "rewinding", i.e. you cannot re-read bytes that the decoder already read. To avoid this you can use ioutil.ReadAll to read the full contents of the body and then json.Unmarshal to do the decoding.
The 2nd type of error would be the json.UnmarshalTypeError. If you look at the documentation of the error type and its fields you'll know that all you need to do is to type assert the returned value and you're done. Example
Validation against "blank" and "silly" values would be done after the json has been successfully decoded into your structure. How you do that is up to you. For example you could use a 3rd party package that's designed for validating structs, or you can implement an in-house solution yourself, etc. I actually don't have an opinion on which one of them is the "best" so I can't help you with that.
What I can say is that the most basic approach would be to simply look at each field of the structure and check if its value is valid or not according to the requirements for that field.
I am trying to understand the code that is used at my company. I am new to go lang, and I have already gone through the tutorial on their official website. However, I am having a hard time wrapping my head around empty interfaces, i.e. interface{}. From various sources online, I figured out that the empty interface can hold any type. But, I am having a hard time figuring out the codebase, especially some of the functions. I will not be posting the entire thing here, but just the minimal functions in which it has been used. Please bear with me!
Function (I am trying to understand):
func (this *RequestHandler) CreateAppHandler(rw http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) *foo.ResponseError {
var data *views.Data = &views.Data{Attributes: &domain.Application{}}
var request *views.Request = &views.Request{Data: data}
if err := json.NewDecoder(r.Body).Decode(request); err != nil {
logrus.Error(err)
return foo.NewResponsePropogateError(foo.STATUS_400, err)
}
requestApp := request.Data.Attributes.(*domain.Application)
requestApp.CreatedBy = user
Setting some context, RequestHandler is a struct defined in the same package as this code. domain and views are seperate packages. Application is a struct in the package domain. The following two structs are part of the package views:
type Data struct {
Id string `json:"id"`
Type string `json:"type"`
Attributes interface{} `json:"attributes"`
}
type Request struct {
Data *Data `json:"data"`
}
The following are part of the package json:
func NewDecoder(r io.Reader) *Decoder {
return &Decoder{r: r}
}
func (dec *Decoder) Decode(v interface{}) error {
if dec.err != nil {
return dec.err
}
if err := dec.tokenPrepareForDecode(); err != nil {
return err
}
if !dec.tokenValueAllowed() {
return &SyntaxError{msg: "not at beginning of value"}
}
// Read whole value into buffer.
n, err := dec.readValue()
if err != nil {
return err
}
dec.d.init(dec.buf[dec.scanp : dec.scanp+n])
dec.scanp += n
// Don't save err from unmarshal into dec.err:
// the connection is still usable since we read a complete JSON
// object from it before the error happened.
err = dec.d.unmarshal(v)
// fixup token streaming state
dec.tokenValueEnd()
return err
}
type Decoder struct {
r io.Reader
buf []byte
d decodeState
scanp int // start of unread data in buf
scan scanner
err error
tokenState int
tokenStack []int
}
Now, I understood that, in the struct Data in package views, Application is being set as a type for the empty interface. After that, a pointer to Request in the same package is created which points to the variable data.
I have the following doubts:
What exactly does this keyword mean in Go? What is the purpose of writing this * RequestHandler?
Initialization of a structure in Go can be done while assigning it to a variable by specifying the values of all it's members. However, here, for the struct Data, only the empty interface value is assigned and the values for the other two fields are not assigned?
What is the advantage of assigning the Application struct to an empty interface? Does it mean I can use the struct members using the interface variable directly?
Can someone help me figure out the meaning of this statement? json.NewDecoder(r.Body).Decode(request)?
While I know this is too much, but I am having a hard time figuring out the meaning of interfaces in Go. Please help!
this is not a keyword in go; any variable name can be used there. That is called the receiver. A function declared in that way must be called like thing.func(params), where "thing" is an expression of the type of the receiver. Within the function, the receiver is set to the value of thing.
A struct literal does not have to contain values for all the fields (or any of them). Any fields not explicitly set will have the zero value for their types.
As you said, an empty interface can take on a value of any type. To use a value of type interface{}, you would use type assertion or a type switch to determine the type of the value, or you could use reflection to use the value without having to have code for the specific type.
What specifically about that statement do you not understand? json is the name of a package in which the function NewDecoder is declared. That function is called, and then the Decode function (which is implemented by the type of the return value of NewDecoder) is called on that return value.
You may want to take a look at Effective Go and/or The Go Programming Language Specification for more information.
I have a short Go program that runs the go list -json command for several packages, stores the output of each run of the command in a json.RawMessage, appends each json.RawMessage into a slice of json.RawMessages, and then returns the result to the server after concatenating each of the json.RawMessages together and compacting the json. However, there is an error message that gets produced when I run json.Compact that I can't locate the source of. Googling this error message reveals that most people who seem to encounter it--whether it's for an invalid , or some other character--have a hard time finding the source of it.
invalid character ',' looking for beginning of value
The code with comments is available to view here on play.golang.org (although it won't run there) and also below.
Question: can you explain the source of this error and how to prevent it?
(Note, some of the packages were included just for testing purposes)
package main
import (
"expvar"
"encoding/json"
"bytes"
"fmt"
"github.com/go-martini/martini"
"github.com/zenazn/goji"
"github.com/zenazn/goji/web"
"go/build"
"log"
"math/rand"
"net/http"
_ "net/http/pprof"
"os/exec"
)
type myType struct {
J []json.RawMessage
}
var pack map[string]string
type GoList struct {
Imports []string
}
type Import struct {
Dir string
ImportPath string
Name string
Target string
Standard bool
Root string
GoFiles []string
Imports []string
Deps []string
}
const contentTypeJSON = "application/json"
func main() {
http.HandleFunc("/importgraph", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { importGraph(w, r) })
http.HandleFunc("/", handler)
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}
func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
fmt.Println("Inside handler")
fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello world from my Go program!")
}
func importGraph(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
pack = make(map[string]string)
var t myType
cmd := exec.Command("go", "list", "-json")
stdout, err := cmd.Output()
if err != nil {
println(err.Error())
return
}
var list GoList
err = json.Unmarshal(stdout, &list)
for _, d := range list.Imports {
//get the imports for each of the packages listed by go list -json
t.imports(d)
}
var buff bytes.Buffer
//concatenate the separate json.RawMessages together into json
buff.WriteByte('[')
for i, j := range t.J {
if i != 0 {
buff.WriteByte(',')
}
buff.Write([]byte(j))
}
buff.WriteByte(']')
var buffer bytes.Buffer
if err := json.Compact(&buffer, buff.Bytes()); err != nil {
println(err.Error()) //error message: invalid character ',' looking for beginning of value
return
}
w.Header().Set("Content-Type", contentTypeJSON)
w.Write(buffer.Bytes())
}
func (myObj *myType) imports(pk string) error {
cmd := exec.Command("go", "list", "-json", pk)
stdout, _ := cmd.Output()
pack[pk] = pk
var deplist Import
json.Unmarshal(stdout, &deplist)
var newj json.RawMessage
json.Unmarshal(stdout, &newj)
myObj.J = append(myObj.J, newj)
for _, imp := range deplist.Imports {
if _, ok := pack[imp]; !ok {
myObj.imports(imp) //recursive call to get the imports of the imports etc
}
}
return nil
}
First, as has been commented, are you sure you can't use
the go/build package directly rather than running go list?
I Wouldn't use println (or fmt.Println) inside HTTP handlers. It's much better to use log.Println and/or get the error into the ResponseWriter. Also, it's a good idea to wrap your ListenAndServe call with log.Fatal.
When printing/logging error values you can just use err, no need to have err.Error().
Further, when you actually want to do something more detailed than just reporting/logging the error message you can look at it's type and other info. For example, log.Printf("verbose error info: %#v", err) gives:
&json.SyntaxError{msg:"invalid character ',' looking for beginning of value", Offset:0}
I tried this because I know the json package returns various error types with additional info and I was hoping the offset value would be of help. If it had been then something like this might have been helpful:
if err := json.Compact(…) {
if err != nil {
log.Println("json.Compact:", err)
if serr, ok := err.(*json.SyntaxError); ok {
log.Println("Occurred at offset:", serr.Offset)
// … something to show the data in buff around that offset …
}
}
}
But offset zero isn't helpful :(
So although this doesn't identify you problem hopefully
it can be of some help to your further investigation.
Edit:
So after adding:
log.Println("Write file:", ioutil.WriteFile("data.json", buff.Bytes(), 0600))
to the above error handling block I then ran a JSON validator on the resultant file and it identified this piece:
"XTestImports": [
"io",
"log",
"net"
]
},,{
"Dir": "/usr/local/go/src/mime",
"ImportPath": "mime",
"Name": "mime",
Note the double ,,.
That should tell you whete the error in your code is.
But if not, you need to skip empty entries, either when processing t.J or when you build it. The later is better and just involves:
if len(newj) > 0 {
myObj.J = append(myObj.J, newj)
}
(where btw you don't check for errors from json.Unmarshal so it's not clear if that is supposed to ever be empty or if it's empty due to a preceeding error. Never ignore error returns!)
I also encountered the same error message in a Go program, but the error message was within the HTTP response error, in HTML format when my HTTP response parser expected JSON.
For me, the solution was to change my request to include setting the Content-Type header to application/json. How you do this depends on which http client library you happen to be using; if you have access to the http.Header core type, you can set the header with .Set(...).
I realize the scope of this fix for me may not apply to the original question, but I came here first after googling and thought this would help others, since the message was not particularly obvious at first glance. The hint is that the invalid < character is the first HTML character in the error/response, which is likely the result of the request type not being set to application/json, thus the server responds with a non JSON response.
For me the issue was I was trying to parse the already parsed JSON.
I was also facing this error "invalid character 'N' looking for beginning of value".
This error was coming while "unmarshalling the non-json response into a json". I was expecting a json response, so wrote go code to unmarshal it into a json. But, due to URL change, the response that I was getting was a text ie. "404 Not found" error, which cannot be unmarshalled into a json.
"invalid character 'N' looking for beginning of value"
So, to summarise, this error appears when we are trying to unmarshal a non-json response (text/html/xml) into json.
Reason for this eerie error message is :
// When unmarshaling quoted strings, invalid UTF-8 or
// invalid UTF-16 surrogate pairs are not treated as an error.
// Instead, they are replaced by the Unicode replacement
// character U+FFFD.
https://golang.org/src/encoding/json/decode.go
In my case I saved my json as string then parsed it by :
stringData = JSON.parse(myJsonString)
I also had the same error another time using gin-context-ShouldBind() (https://godoc.org/github.com/gin-gonic/gin#Context.ShouldBind) and mapping my json to go object:
error was because it needs a json as string, so I used : JSON.stringify(jsonObject) when sending my request from front-end part.
And in case someone has the same problem as me, I needed to call JSON.stringify on my post data.
I encountered a similar problem with my error message being:
invalid character 'I' looking for beginning of value
In my case, i was trying to decode BSON using json.Unmarshal. Json doesn't recognize the ISODate type, which caused this error.
I had a similar issue. For me I omitted the first letter of my authorization token. So instead of
"eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJlbWFpbCI6InJhcGhhZWxuZ0BlbWFpbC5jb20iLCJleHAiOjE2MTM5NTQzMjB9.yPGC937VNAF8Qg05Z1x3fZ3zu_MUs-cA_Iag5-4RcJE"
I used this
"yJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJlbWFpbCI6InJhcGhhZWxuZ0BlbWFpbC5jb20iLCJleHAiOjE2MTM5NTQzMjB9.yPGC937VNAF8Qg05Z1x3fZ3zu_MUs-cA_Iag5-4RcJE"
I am using json to store data on disk between program calls, the program runs fine for some time, but after that it displays error in json decoding, "invalid character '1' after top-level value ".
Can anyone suggest some solution to this problem ?
Instead of doing the manual file opening, consider using some of the inbuilt IO functions.
import (
"io/ioutil"
"encoding/json"
)
...
func Save(myobj SomeType, filename string) (err error) {
var data []byte
if data, err = json.Marshal(myobj); err != nil {
return
}
return ioutil.WriteFile(filename, data)
}
The same goes for loading of json data where you use ioutil.ReadFile and json.Unmarshal.
When you write the data to disk, are you making sure to pass os.O_TRUNC (or otherwise truncate the file) in the open flags? If not, the program will work fine until you write an object smaller than the last. But it's hard to debug code without seeing it.