Using XML in Golang

XML is a data-interchange format. It is heavily used alongside with JSON. Working with XML is simple in Golang. In this post, we will see how to work with XML in Golang.

Required imports

To work with XML we need to import encoding/xml package.

import "encoding/xml"

Encoding with XML

Now, we can start working with XML in Go. First, we need to define the XML format alongside the data structure. Then we can simply marshal or unmarshal depending on what we want to do.

Here is an example of encoding to XML data:

package main

import (
	"encoding/xml"
	"fmt"
)

type Person struct {
	Name string
	Age  int
}

func main() {
	p := &Person{"Jack", 22}

	v, _ := xml.MarshalIndent(p, "", " ")

	fmt.Println(string(v))
}

Decoding custom data to struct

We can unmarshal custom data to a struct using the XML package. Here is an example of a custom data unmarshalled to a struct.

package main

import (
	"encoding/xml"
	"fmt"
)

type Book struct {
	Name   string `xml:"Name"`
	Author string `xml:"Author"`
}

func main() {
	s := `
		<Book>
		 <Name>War And Peace</Name>
		 <Author>Leo Tolstoy</Author>
		</Book>
	`

	b := &Book{}

	xml.Unmarshal([]byte(s), b)

	fmt.Println(b)
}

Observe that, we declared the names of the tags beside the struct to declare what data goes to what. Also, when unmarshalling we use the string that uses backticks.