How to clear a map in Go?

Question

I\'m looking for something like the c++ function .clear() for the primitive type map.

Or should I just create a new map instead?

Updat

Answer 1

If you are trying to do this in a loop, you can take advantage of the initialization to clear out the map for you. For example:

for i:=0; i<2; i++ {
    animalNames := make(map[string]string)
    switch i {
        case 0:
            animalNames["cat"] = "Patches"
        case 1:
            animalNames["dog"] = "Spot";
    }

    fmt.Println("For map instance", i)
    for key, value := range animalNames {
        fmt.Println(key, value)
    }
    fmt.Println("-----------\n")
}

When you execute this, it clears out the previous map and starts with an empty map. This is verified by the output:

$ go run maptests.go 
For map instance 0
cat Patches
-----------

For map instance 1
dog Spot
-----------