Exploring Go Features with JSON: iota, new, label, goto, and underscore

Exploring Go’s Hidden Gems: iota, new, goto, Labels, and Underscore

Baking with Go: A clean mixing bowl represents ‘new,’ numbered recipe steps illustrate ‘iota,’ skipping to cleanup shows ‘goto,’ and ignoring extra ingredients symbolizes the underscore (_)

In this blog, we’ll dive deeper into Go’s lesser-known features — iota, new, labels, goto, and the underscore (_)—by incorporating JSON into our examples. JSON is a widely used data format, and combining it with these Go features will help demonstrate their practical applications.

1. iota with JSON: Enumerations for Configuration

iota is perfect for defining enumerated constants, which can be useful when working with JSON configurations. For example, let’s define a set of status codes and unmarshal JSON data into a struct.

Example:

package main


import (
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
)

// Define status codes using iota
const (
	StatusPending = iota // 0
	StatusActive         // 1
	StatusCompleted      // 2
)

// Config represents a configuration with a status
type Config struct {
	Task     string `json:"task"`
	Status   int    `json:"status"`
}

func main() {
	// JSON data
	data := `{"task": "Write a blog", "status": 1}`

	// Unmarshal JSON into Config struct
	var config Config
	err := json.Unmarshal([]byte(data), &config)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println("Error unmarshaling JSON:", err)
		return
	}

	// Print the result…