There are so many verbs for the fmt.Printf family, but going through the documentation (https://pkg.go.dev/fmt) I can't find an easy way to print the content of a *string and alike (with something like <nil> in case it's a nil pointer). I was hoping that %v might serve that purpose, but that returns the pointer's address instead.
Am I missing something here or do I have to resort to utility methods everytime I want to write the content of such a pointer value into an error message or a log entry?
Print the Content of *string
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1 Answers
While not as convenient as a verb, here's one utility function will work for any pointer type:
package main
import "log"
func safeDeref[T any](p *T) T {
if p == nil {
var v T
return v
}
return *p
}
func main() {
s := "hello"
sp := &s
var np *string
log.Printf("s: %s, sp: %s, np: %s", s, safeDeref(sp), safeDeref(np))
}
2022/09/06 15:01:50 s: hello, sp: hello, np:
*string is pretty rare in idiomatic Go. Unless you really need nil, I'd suggest just using string.
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