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How to Dereference Pointer Fields for Effective Debugging in Go?

Mary-Kate Olsen
Mary-Kate OlsenOriginal
2024-11-10 02:09:02936browse

How to Dereference Pointer Fields for Effective Debugging in Go?

Dereferencing Pointer Fields for Debugging

When printing a struct with pointer fields, they are usually displayed as memory addresses. This can be inconvenient for debugging, especially if a struct contains numerous pointer fields.

Consider this example:

package main

import "fmt"

type SomeStruct struct {
    somePointer *somePointer
}
type somePointer struct {
    field string
}

func main() {
    fmt.Println(SomeStruct{&somePointer{"I want to see what is in here"}})
}

This code prints the memory address instead of the desired value:

{0x10500168}

To print the actual value stored in the pointer field, we can use the go-spew package, which specializes in printing complex data structures in a human-readable format.

Here's how to use it:

package main

import (
    "github.com/davecgh/go-spew/spew"
)

type (
    SomeStruct struct {
        Field1 string
        Field2 int
        Field3 *somePointer
    }
    somePointer struct {
        field string
    }
)

func main() {
    s := SomeStruct{
        Field1: "Yahoo",
        Field2: 500,
        Field3: &somePointer{"I want to see what is in here"},
    }
    spew.Dump(s)
}

This code produces the following output:

(main.SomeStruct) {
    Field1: (string) "Yahoo",
    Field2: (int) 500,
    Field3: (*main.somePointer)(0x2102a7230)({
        field: (string) "I want to see what is in here"
    })
}

As you can see, go-spew provides a much more detailed and informative representation of the struct. The pointer fields are dereferenced and displayed as their actual values. This makes it much easier to inspect the content of a struct during debugging.

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