DATA STRUCTURES: JSON

Working with JSON in Go

JSON is a text-based data exchange format primarily used between browsers and servers. In this article, we are going to look at JSON encoding and decoding APIs provided by the Go.

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JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is one of the most popular data exchange formats on the web. It’s a text encoded format, which means JSON data is a string of characters written in valid JSON format. You can follow the format of JSON from RFC 7159 documentation.

The example below is a valid JSON format, however, you may need to convert this text-data into a string data-type first in order to work with JSON APIs provided by the language.

{
    "firstName": "John",
    "lastName": "Doe",
    "age": 21,
    "heightInMeters": 1.75,
    "isMale": true,
    "profile": null,
    "languages": [ "English", "French" ],
    "grades": {
        "math": "A",
        "science": "A+"
    }
}

The JSON format was created as a means to transport data between browser and server that can be easily encoded from a JavaScript object or decoded to a JavaScript object by the JavaScript engine. Hence, JSON data looks exactly like a JavaScript object but in a string format.