How to get JSON response from http.Get

Question

I\'m trying read JSON data from web, but that code returns empty result. I\'m not sure what I\'m doing wrong here.

package main

import \"os\"
import \"fmt\"         


        

Answer 1

The ideal way is not to use ioutil.ReadAll, but rather use a decoder on the reader directly. Here's a nice function that gets a url and decodes its response onto a target structure.

var myClient = &http.Client{Timeout: 10 * time.Second}

func getJson(url string, target interface{}) error {
    r, err := myClient.Get(url)
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    defer r.Body.Close()

    return json.NewDecoder(r.Body).Decode(target)
}

Example use:

type Foo struct {
    Bar string
}

func main() {
    foo1 := new(Foo) // or &Foo{}
    getJson("http://example.com", foo1)
    println(foo1.Bar)

    // alternately:

    foo2 := Foo{}
    getJson("http://example.com", &foo2)
    println(foo2.Bar)
}

You should not be using the default *http.Client structure in production as this answer originally demonstrated! (Which is what http.Get/etc call to). The reason is that the default client has no timeout set; if the remote server is unresponsive, you're going to have a bad day.