Serialize structures in Golang

In this blogpost I'll show you one of the many ways to serialize structures in Go.

Data serialization

The serialization of data is simply a process of translating datatypes, structures (or objects in other languages) into a defined format as a byte stream, so they can be easily stored or transmitted with the intention to reconstruct it later.

I'll be using the easy and lightweight hprose serialization library¹ (godoc²), so be sure to

go get github.com/hprose/hprose-golang

The code

Make sure you import the library from hprose.

import "github.com/hprose/hprose-go"

In this example we'll be using the time package too.

Let's say we have the following structure that we want to serialize.

type Book struct {
	Name    string
	Pages   int
	Authors []string
	Release *time.Time
}

Lets create an instance of our type 'Book' and initialize some members with data. For example's sake we will be using a pointer to a time structure.

time := time.Now()
	
var SomeBook Book
SomeBook.Name = "Pirate tales"
SomeBook.Pages = 90
SomeBook.Authors = []string{"Peter", "John", "Wilma"}
SomeBook.Release = &time // Pointer to 'time'

Now serialize our 'SomeBook' with the hprose package.

Serialized, err := hprose.Serialize(SomeBook, true)
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

The 'hprose.Serialize()' function takes two arguments, the first one takes an interface (so all data types and structures you can think of), the second argument is a bool and should be true, not only is it faster but using false has no benefits³ for us.

Now the Serialized variable will hold a bytes array with the serialized data. If you were to print it as a string it would read the following.

c4"Book"4{s4"name"s5"pages"s7"authors"s7"release"}o0{s12"Pirate tales"i90;a3{s5"Peter"s4"John"s5"Wilma"}D20180404T233150.084574;}

As you may noticed, the pointer to the 'time' structure gets dereferenced and packed like a structured member, not the actual memory address which it points to.

Now let us unserialize the data.

var NewBook Book
err = hprose.Unserialize(Serialized, &NewBook, true)
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

Full code example

package main
import (
	"github.com/hprose/hprose-go"
	"time"
)
type Book struct {
	Name    string
	Pages   int
	Authors []string
	Release *time.Time
}
func main() {
	time := time.Now()
	var SomeBook Book
	SomeBook.Name = "Pirate tales"
	SomeBook.Pages = 90
	SomeBook.Authors = []string{"Peter", "John", "Wilma"}
	SomeBook.Release = &time // Pointer to 'time'
	Serialized, err := hprose.Serialize(SomeBook, true)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	var NewBook Book
	err = hprose.Unserialize(Serialized, &NewBook, true)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
}