How do I dump the struct into the byte array without reflection?

Question

I already found encoding/binary package to deal with it, but it depended on reflect package so it didn't work with uncapitalized(that is, unexported) struct fields. However I spent a week to find that problem out, I still have a question: if struct fields should not be exported, how do I dump them easily into binary data?

EDIT: Here's the example. If you capitalize the name of fields of Data struct, that works properly. But Data struct was intended to be an abstract type, so I don't want to export these fields.

package main
import (
    "fmt"
    "encoding/binary"
    "bytes"
)

type Data struct {
    id int32
    name [16]byte
}


func main() {
    d := Data{Id: 1}
    copy(d.Name[:], []byte("tree"))
    buffer := new(bytes.Buffer)
    binary.Write(buffer, binary.LittleEndian, d)
    // d was written properly
    fmt.Println(buffer.Bytes())
    // try to read...
    buffer = bytes.NewBuffer(buffer.Bytes())
    var e = new(Data)
    err := binary.Read(buffer, binary.LittleEndian, e)
    fmt.Println(e, err)
}

Answer 1

Your best option would probably be to use the gob package and let your struct implement the GobDecoder and GobEncoder interfaces in order to serialize and deserialize private fields.

This would be safe, platform independent, and efficient. And you have to add those GobEncode and GobDecode functions only on structs with unexported fields, which means you don't clutter the rest of your code.

func (d *Data) GobEncode() ([]byte, error) {
    w := new(bytes.Buffer)
    encoder := gob.NewEncoder(w)
    err := encoder.Encode(d.id)
    if err!=nil {
        return nil, err
    }
    err = encoder.Encode(d.name)
    if err!=nil {
        return nil, err
    }
    return w.Bytes(), nil
}

func (d *Data) GobDecode(buf []byte) error {
    r := bytes.NewBuffer(buf)
    decoder := gob.NewDecoder(r)
    err := decoder.Decode(&d.id)
    if err!=nil {
        return err
    }
    return decoder.Decode(&d.name)
}

func main() {
    d := Data{id: 7}
    copy(d.name[:], []byte("tree"))
    buffer := new(bytes.Buffer)
    // writing
    enc := gob.NewEncoder(buffer)
    err := enc.Encode(d)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal("encode error:", err)
    }
    // reading
    buffer = bytes.NewBuffer(buffer.Bytes())
    e := new(Data)
    dec := gob.NewDecoder(buffer)
    err = dec.Decode(e)
    fmt.Println(e, err)
}