How to copy a map?

Question

I\'m trying to copy the contents of a map ( amap ) inside another one (aSuperMap) and then clear amap so that it can take new values

Answer 1

I'd use recursion just in case so you can deep copy the map and avoid bad surprises in case you were to change a map element that is a map itself.

Here's an example in a utils.go:

package utils

func CopyMap(m map[string]interface{}) map[string]interface{} {
    cp := make(map[string]interface{})
    for k, v := range m {
        vm, ok := v.(map[string]interface{})
        if ok {
            cp[k] = CopyMap(vm)
        } else {
            cp[k] = v
        }
    }

    return cp
}

And its test file (i.e. utils_test.go):

package utils

import (
    "testing"

    "github.com/stretchr/testify/require"
)

func TestCopyMap(t *testing.T) {
    m1 := map[string]interface{}{
        "a": "bbb",
        "b": map[string]interface{}{
            "c": 123,
        },
    }

    m2 := CopyMap(m1)

    m1["a"] = "zzz"
    delete(m1, "b")

    require.Equal(t, map[string]interface{}{"a": "zzz"}, m1)
    require.Equal(t, map[string]interface{}{
        "a": "bbb",
        "b": map[string]interface{}{
            "c": 123,
        },
    }, m2)
}

It should easy enough to adapt if you need the map key to be something else instead of a string.