Parsing XML Files With Golang

Elliot Forbes Elliot Forbes ⏰ 4 Minutes 📅 Apr 9, 2017

In this tutorial we look at how you can effectively read in an XML file from the file system and then parse this file using Go’s “encoding/xml” Package. We’ll look at how you can traverse multiple nested xml elements and then we’ll simply print this out to our terminal window.

Our Example XML File

So to begin with, we’ll need an xml file that we can traverse.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<users>
  <user type="admin">
    <name>Elliot</name>
    <social>
      <facebook>https://facebook.com</facebook>
      <twitter>https://twitter.com</twitter>
      <youtube>https://youtube.com</youtube>
    </social>
  </user>
  <user type="reader">
    <name>Fraser</name>
    <social>
      <facebook>https://facebook.com</facebook>
      <twitter>https://twitter.com</twitter>
      <youtube>https://youtube.com</youtube>
    </social>
  </user>
</users>

You’ll see the above xml has attributes set on the user tags, nested elements and if you are able to parse this then you should, by extension, be able to parse any xml file regardless of size.

Reading in our File

The first obstacle we’ll have to overcome is reading this file into memory. We can do this by using a combination of the “os” package and the “io/ioutil” package.

package main


import (
    "fmt"
    "io/ioutil"
    "os"
)

func main() {

    // Open our xmlFile
    xmlFile, err := os.Open("users.xml")
    // if we os.Open returns an error then handle it
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
    }

    fmt.Println("Successfully Opened users.xml")
    // defer the closing of our xmlFile so that we can parse it later on
    defer xmlFile.Close()

}

Defining our Structs

Before we can parse our xml file, we need to define some structs. We’ll have one to represent the complete list of users, one to represent our user and then one to represent our users social links.

import (
  ...
  // remember to add encoding/xml to your list of imports
    "encoding/xml"
    ...
)

// our struct which contains the complete
// array of all Users in the file
type Users struct {
    XMLName xml.Name `xml:"users"`
    Users   []User   `xml:"user"`
}

// the user struct, this contains our
// Type attribute, our user's name and
// a social struct which will contain all
// our social links
type User struct {
    XMLName xml.Name `xml:"user"`
    Type    string   `xml:"type,attr"`
    Name    string   `xml:"name"`
    Social  Social   `xml:"social"`
}

// a simple struct which contains all our
// social links
type Social struct {
    XMLName  xml.Name `xml:"social"`
    Facebook string   `xml:"facebook"`
    Twitter  string   `xml:"twitter"`
    Youtube  string   `xml:"youtube"`
}

Unmarshalling Our XML

So above we’ve seen how to load in our file into memory, in order to marshal it we need to convert this file to a byte array and then use the xml.Unmarshal method in order to populate our Users array.

// read our opened xmlFile as a byte array.
byteValue, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(xmlFile)

// we initialize our Users array
var users Users
// we unmarshal our byteArray which contains our
// xmlFiles content into 'users' which we defined above
xml.Unmarshal(byteValue, &users)

Full Implementation

package main

import (
    "encoding/xml"
    "fmt"
    "io/ioutil"
    "os"
)

// our struct which contains the complete
// array of all Users in the file
type Users struct {
    XMLName xml.Name `xml:"users"`
    Users   []User   `xml:"user"`
}

// the user struct, this contains our
// Type attribute, our user's name and
// a social struct which will contain all
// our social links
type User struct {
    XMLName xml.Name `xml:"user"`
    Type    string   `xml:"type,attr"`
    Name    string   `xml:"name"`
    Social  Social   `xml:"social"`
}

// a simple struct which contains all our
// social links
type Social struct {
    XMLName  xml.Name `xml:"social"`
    Facebook string   `xml:"facebook"`
    Twitter  string   `xml:"twitter"`
    Youtube  string   `xml:"youtube"`
}

func main() {

    // Open our xmlFile
    xmlFile, err := os.Open("users.xml")
    // if we os.Open returns an error then handle it
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
    }

    fmt.Println("Successfully Opened users.xml")
    // defer the closing of our xmlFile so that we can parse it later on
    defer xmlFile.Close()

    // read our opened xmlFile as a byte array.
    byteValue, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(xmlFile)

    // we initialize our Users array
    var users Users
    // we unmarshal our byteArray which contains our
    // xmlFiles content into 'users' which we defined above
    xml.Unmarshal(byteValue, &users)

    // we iterate through every user within our users array and
    // print out the user Type, their name, and their facebook url
    // as just an example
    for i := 0; i < len(users.Users); i++ {
        fmt.Println("User Type: " + users.Users[i].Type)
        fmt.Println("User Name: " + users.Users[i].Name)
        fmt.Println("Facebook Url: " + users.Users[i].Social.Facebook)
    }

}

Conclusion

I hope you found this tutorial beneficial, if you’ve got anything you wish to add then please do in the comments section below!