Just noticed something that is not particularly intuitive. When
implementing an fmt.Stringer by adding a String() method to a struct
in Go so that fmt.Print*() does the right thing you need to be sure to
make it not a pointer receiver.
type Foo struct {}
func (f Foo) String() string {return "foo"}
If you don’t do that then initializations like the following will not do what you want:
var foo Foo
foo.Load() // or whatever
fmt.Print(foo) // prints the Go marshaling, not what you want
Now, you might not catch that, though, because a lot people just create pointers right away, like this:
foo := new(Foo)
foo.Load() // or whatever
fmt.Print(foo) // prints your String() output
So, moral of the story: always use the non-pointer receiver when implementing fmt.Stringer and GoStringer.
#golang #coding #tips #stringer