Decode arbitrary JSON in Golang

Question

I have a question about decoding arbitrary JSON objects/messages in Go.. Lets say for example you have three wildly different JSON objects (aka messages) that you can receive on an http connection, lets call them for sake of illustration:

{ home : { some unique set of arrays, objects, fields, and arrays objects } }

and

{ bike : { some unique set of arrays, objects, fields, and arrays objects } }

and

{ soda : { some unique set of arrays, objects, fields, and arrays objects } }

What I am thinking is you could decode these, from an http connection in to a map of interfaces such as:

func httpServerHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    message := make(map[string]interface{})
    decoder := json.NewDecoder(r.Body)
    _ = decoder.Decode(&message)

Then do an if, else if block to look for valid JSON messages

if _, ok := message["home"]; ok {
    // Decode interface{} to appropriate struct
} else if _, ok := message["bike"]; ok {
    // Decode interface{} to appropriate struct
} else {
    // Decode interface{} to appropriate struct
}

Now in the if block I can make it work if I re-decode the entire package, but I was thinking that is kind of a waste since I have already partially decoded it and would only need to decode the value of the map which is an interface{}, but I can not seem to get that to work right.

Redecoding the entire thing works though, if I do something like the following where the homeType for example is a struct:

var homeObject homeType
var bikeObject bikeType
var sodaObject sodaType

Then in the if block do:

if _, ok := message["home"]; ok {
    err = json.Unmarshal(r.Body, &homeObject)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println("Bad Response, unable to decode JSON message contents")
        os.Exit(1)
    }

So without re-decoding / unmarshal-ing the entire thing again, how do you work with the interface{} in a map?

Alfred Rossi · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-11T18:34:29.910

2

If you have something like a map[string]interface{} then you can access the values using type assertions, e.g.

home, valid := msg["home"].(string)
if !valid {
    return
}

This works nicely for simple values. For more complicated nested structures you might find it easier to do deferred decoding with json.RawMessage or implement a custom json.Unmarshaler. See this for a very detailed discussion.

Another idea might be to define a custom Message type consisting of pointers to Home, Bike, and Soda structs. Such as

type Home struct {
    HomeStuff     int
    MoreHomeStuff string
} 

type Bike struct {
    BikeStuff int
}

type Message struct {
    Bike *Bike `json:"Bike,omitempty"`
    Home *Home `json:"Home,omitempty"`
}

If you set these to omit if nil then unmarshalling should only populate the relevant one. You can play with it here.

edited May 11 '15 at 18:34

answered May 11 '15 at 17:45

Alfred Rossi

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The error I get when I try to unmarshal / decode the map value (aka the interface{}) is I need a type assertion, and I am not sure how to do it. If I know the the value is really a homeType struct how do I get it out of being an interface so I can unmarshal it an object of homeType? – jordan2175 May 11 '15 at 18:04
In that case I'd do something like this http://play.golang.org/p/hHQlAdcE56. Will update the answer – Alfred Rossi May 11 '15 at 18:30
To address your comment directly, you won't be able to type assert cleanly to a struct, because the inner object was unmarshalled as map[string]interface{} -- so you have to pick that apart field by field. See http://play.golang.org/p/WrpLxZH0r- and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26744873/converting-map-to-struct – Alfred Rossi May 11 '15 at 19:00

Decode arbitrary JSON in Golang

1 Answers1