Save an image from url to file

Question

Very new to Go (first simple project I\'m working on).

Question: How do I get an image from URL and then save it to my computer?

Here\'s what I have so far:<

Answer 1

There is no need to decode the file. Simply copy the response body to a file you've opened. Here's the deal in the modified example:

1. response.Body is a stream of data, and implements the Reader interface - meaning you can sequentially call Read on it, as if it was an open file.
2. The file I'm opening here implements the Writer interface. This is the opposite - it's a stream you can call Write on.
3. io.Copy "patches" a reader and a writer, consumes the reader stream and writes its contents to a Writer.

This is one of my favorite things about go - implicit interfaces. You don't have to declare you're implementing an interface, you just have to implement it to be used in some context. This allows mixing and matching of code that doesn't need to know about other code it's interacting with.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "io"
    "log"
    "net/http"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    url := "http://i.imgur.com/m1UIjW1.jpg"
    // don't worry about errors
    response, e := http.Get(url)
    if e != nil {
        log.Fatal(e)
    }
    defer response.Body.Close()

    //open a file for writing
    file, err := os.Create("/tmp/asdf.jpg")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer file.Close()

    // Use io.Copy to just dump the response body to the file. This supports huge files
    _, err = io.Copy(file, response.Body)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    fmt.Println("Success!")
}