How To Print Struct Variables In Golang

You might sometimes wonder how to print struct variables in Go in order to inspect the value for debugging purposes. Here it comes a simple example where we have a struct with a string and a pointer to another struct. Which consenquently has two string values.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
)

type ServicePortName struct {
    Name string
    Port string
}

type ServiceEndpoint struct {
    Endpoint        string
    ServicePortName *ServicePortName
}

func main() {
    svc := &ServiceEndpoint{"/api/users", &ServicePortName{"app.user", "9000"}}
    fmt.Printf("%+v", svc)
}        

Indeed is quite easy to use the most common known package in the Go standard library: fmt. Which offers the following formatting option %+v. https://golang.org/pkg/fmt/#hdr-Printing.

%v the value in a default format
when printing structs, the plus flag (%+v) adds field names

This is the expected output from the above code snippet

{Endpoint:/api/users ServicePortName: 0x40a0f0}        

At this point we also want to be able to inspect the struct value referenced by the struct pointer *ServicePortName
An easy way to recursively printing all the values from a given variable we can use an handy method https://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/#MarshalIndent in the encoding/json package which always come with the standard library

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "encoding/json"
)

type ServicePortName struct {
    Name string
    Port string
}

type ServiceEndpoint struct {
    Endpoint        string
    ServicePortName *ServicePortName
}

func main() {
    svc := &ServiceEndpoint{"/api/users", &ServicePortName{"app.user", "9000"}}
    s, _ := json.MarshalIndent(svc, "", "\t")
    fmt.Println(string(s))
}      

The expected output at this point is the following

{
  "Endpoint": "/api/users",
  "ServicePortName": {
    "Name": "app.user",
    "Port": "9000"
  }
}