Passing a pointer to bufio.Scanner() - go

Question

Lest I provide an XY problem, my goal is to share a memory-mapped file between multiple goroutines as recommended. Each goroutine needs to iterate over the file line by line so I had hoped to store the complete contents in memory first to speed things up.
The method I tried is passing a pointer to a bufio.Scanner, but that is not working. I thought it might be related to needing to set the seek position back to the beginning of the file but it is not even working the very first time and I can find no such parameter in the documentation. My attempt was to create this function then pass the result by reference to the function I intend to run in a goroutine (for right now, I am not using goroutines just to make sure this works outright, which it does not).
Here is a MWE:
// ... package declaration; imports; yada yada
func main() {
// ... validate path to file stored in filePath variable
filePath := "/path/to/file.txt"
// get word list scanner to be shared between goroutines
scanner := getScannerPtr(&filePath)
// pass to function (no goroutine for now, I try to solve one problem at a time)
myfunc(scanner)
}
func getScannerPtr(filePath *string) *bufio.Scanner {
f, err := os.Open(*filePath)
if err != nil {
fmt.Fprint(os.Stderr, "Error opening file\n")
panic(err)
}
defer f.Close()
scanner := bufio.NewScanner(f)
scanner.Split(bufio.ScanLines)
return scanner
}
func myfunc(scanner *bufio.Scanner) {
for scanner.Scan() {
line := strings.TrimSpace(scanner.Text())
// ... do something with line
}
}
I'm not receiving any errors, it just is not iterating over the file when I call Scan() so it never makes it inside that block to do anything with each line of the file. Keep in mind I am not even using concurrency yet, that is just my eventual goal which I want to point out in case that impacts the method I need to take.
Why is Scan() not working?
Is this is a viable approach if I intend to call go myfunc(scanner) in the future?

Answer 1

You're closing the file before you ever use the Scanner:
func getScannerPtr(filePath *string) *bufio.Scanner {
f, err := os.Open(*filePath)
if err != nil {
fmt.Fprint(os.Stderr, "Error opening file\n")
panic(err)
}
defer f.Close() // <--- Here
scanner := bufio.NewScanner(f)
scanner.Split(bufio.ScanLines)
return scanner // <-- File gets closed, then Scanner that tries to read it is returned for further use, which won't work
}
Because Scanner does not expose Close, you'll need to work around this; the quickest is probably to make a simple custom type with a couple of embedded fields:
type FileScanner struct {
io.Closer
*bufio.Scanner
}
func getScannerPtr(filePath *string) *FileScanner {
f, err := os.Open(*filePath)
if err != nil {
fmt.Fprint(os.Stderr, "Error opening file\n")
panic(err)
}
scanner := bufio.NewScanner(f)
return &FileScanner{f, scanner}
}
func myfunc(scanner *FileScanner) {
defer scanner.Close()
for scanner.Scan() {
line := strings.TrimSpace(scanner.Text())
// ... do something with line
}
}