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An aside: // album represents data about a record album. type album struct { ID string `json:"id"` Title string `json:"title"`

An aside: // album represents data about a record album. type album struct { ID string `json:"id"` Title string `json:"title"` Artist string `json:"artist"` Price float64 `json:"price"` } I've always wondered why there's no capacity to tag the entire struct in Golang, for situations like this. Either `json:expose-private-members` type album struct { id string ... } or `json:lowercase-public-members` type album struct { ID string ... } To avoid having to repeat yourself twice and cut down on the noise, considering that these tags are picked up via reflection anyway, why not tag the type itself? If you wanted, you could always have field tags override struct tags if necessary.

benhoyt 5y ago
I suspect it's because Go's general philosophy is that it's better to be verbose and explicit (than terse and magical). Probably falls under "clear is better than clever" from Rob Pike's Go Proverbs: http://go-proverbs.github.io/ http://go-proverbs.github.io/ I think if this feature was added, it would not be with struct tags, but with an Encoder.SetFieldTransform(json.SnakeCase) or similar setting. That might be quite a nice feature, actually. You could provide your own function to transform names when marshaling, and for unmarshaling it would strip punctuation and match case insensitively (because it's hard to do the reverse transform, for example should user_id go to UserId or UserID, and if the latter, how does the transform know?). In any case, it seems like an issue was opened proposing something like that a couple of years ago (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23027 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23027), and Russ Cox responded that the JSON package is basically done, but you could either fork it and add the feature, or use a tool that modifies struct tags like https://github.com/fatih/gomodifytags https://github.com/fatih/gomodifytags

benhoyt 5y ago

I suspect it's because Go's general philosophy is that it's better to be verbose and explicit (than terse and magical). Probably falls under "clear is better than clever" from Rob Pike's Go Proverbs: http://go-proverbs.github.io/ http://go-proverbs.github.io/ I think if this feature was added, it would not be with struct tags, but with an Encoder.SetFieldTransform(json.SnakeCase) or similar setting. That might be quite a nice feature, actually. You could provide your own function to transform names when marshaling, and for unmarshaling it would strip punctuation and match case insensitively (because it's hard to do the reverse transform, for example should user_id go to UserId or UserID, and if the latter, how does the transform know?). In any case, it seems like an issue was opened proposing something like that a couple of years ago (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23027 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23027), and Russ Cox responded that the JSON package is basically done, but you could either fork it and add the feature, or use a tool that modifies struct tags like https://github.com/fatih/gomodifytags https://github.com/fatih/gomodifytags