7 Text files

Handling text files is a big part of web development. We often need to produce or handle received text content, including strings, numbers, JSON, XML, etc. As a high performance language, Go has good support for this in its standard library. You’ll find that these supporting libraries are just awesome, and will allow you to easily deal with any text content you may encounter. This chapter contains 4 sections, and will give you a full introduction to text processing in Go.

XML is an interactive language that is commonly used in many APIs, many web servers written in Java use XML as their standard interaction language. We’ll more talk about XML in section 7.1. In section 7.2, we’ll take a look at JSON which has been very popular in recent years and is much more convenient than XML. In section 7.3, we are going to talk about regular expressions which (for the majority of people) looks like a language used by aliens. In section 7.4, you will see how the MVC pattern is used to develop applications in Go, and also how to use Go’s template package for templating your views. In section 7.5, we’ll introduce you to file and folder operations. Finally, we will explain some Go string operations in section 7.6.