wtf goUnmarshal JSON data in non-standard ways
Reading and writing data is the basis of any program in every language, and go is no different. While the default JSON unmarshaler is generally good enough to read in JSON data, there are times when you’ll need to implement your own custom unmarshal. The most common scenarios I’ve run into for this are that either a date/time isn’t in RFC 3339 format, or the JSON data has more json data embedded in a string. Below is an example to customize unmarshalling a time that is not in the RFC 3999 format.
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"time"
)
// Time wraps the standard time.Time to allow for custom parsing from json
type Time struct {
time.Time
}
func main() {
// temp structure to hold the data being parsed
// in reality there would likely be a larger structure
type temp struct {
TempTime *Time `json:"time"`
}
// data to parse
data := []byte("{\"time\": \"2021-05-22T18:31:59.588379+00:00\"}")
parsedData := new(temp)
err := json.Unmarshal(data, parsedData)
if err != nil {
println(err.Error())
return
}
// print out the unix timestamp for the input time
println(parsedData.TempTime.Unix())
}
// UnmarshalJSON implemented to allow for parsing this time object
// with a different format
func (t *Time) UnmarshalJSON(b []byte) error {
// the layout of the timestamp being parsed
layout := "2006-01-02T15:04:05.999999999-07:00"
var timeAsString string
// grab the string value of the input
err := json.Unmarshal(b, &timeAsString)
// parse it using the time package, returning an error if it errors
// otherwise storing the result
timestamp, err := time.Parse(layout, timeAsString)
if err != nil {
return err
}
t.Time = timestamp
return nil
}
If you were to run the above example code 1621708319 should print out from parsing the json data out of the byte slice, leveraging the custom unmarshaler that was written.
The reason this works is UnmarshalJSON(b []byte) error is defined in an interface, specifically the Unmarshaler interface, similarly the MarshalJSON function is defined in the Marshaler interface and could be overridden.
