How to read/write from/to file using Go?

Question

I've been trying to learn Go on my own, but I've been stumped on trying read from and write to ordinary files.

I can get as far as inFile, _ := os.Open(INFILE, 0, 0), but actually getting the content of the file doesn't make sense, because the read function takes a []byte as a parameter.

func (file *File) Read(b []byte) (n int, err Error)

Answer 1

Let's make a Go 1-compatible list of all the ways to read and write files in Go.

Because file API has changed recently and most other answers don't work with Go 1. They also miss bufio which is important IMHO.

In the following examples I copy a file by reading from it and writing to the destination file.

Start with the basics

package main

import (
    "io"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    // open input file
    fi, err := os.Open("input.txt")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    // close fi on exit and check for its returned error
    defer func() {
        if err := fi.Close(); err != nil {
            panic(err)
        }
    }()

    // open output file
    fo, err := os.Create("output.txt")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    // close fo on exit and check for its returned error
    defer func() {
        if err := fo.Close(); err != nil {
            panic(err)
        }
    }()

    // make a buffer to keep chunks that are read
    buf := make([]byte, 1024)
    for {
        // read a chunk
        n, err := fi.Read(buf)
        if err != nil && err != io.EOF {
            panic(err)
        }
        if n == 0 {
            break
        }

        // write a chunk
        if _, err := fo.Write(buf[:n]); err != nil {
            panic(err)
        }
    }
}

Here I used os.Open and os.Create which are convenient wrappers around os.OpenFile. We usually don't need to call OpenFile directly.

Notice treating EOF. Read tries to fill buf on each call, and returns io.EOF as error if it reaches end of file in doing so. In this case buf will still hold data. Consequent calls to Read returns zero as the number of bytes read and same io.EOF as error. Any other error will lead to a panic.

Using bufio

package main

import (
    "bufio"
    "io"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    // open input file
    fi, err := os.Open("input.txt")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    // close fi on exit and check for its returned error
    defer func() {
        if err := fi.Close(); err != nil {
            panic(err)
        }
    }()
    // make a read buffer
    r := bufio.NewReader(fi)

    // open output file
    fo, err := os.Create("output.txt")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    // close fo on exit and check for its returned error
    defer func() {
        if err := fo.Close(); err != nil {
            panic(err)
        }
    }()
    // make a write buffer
    w := bufio.NewWriter(fo)

    // make a buffer to keep chunks that are read
    buf := make([]byte, 1024)
    for {
        // read a chunk
        n, err := r.Read(buf)
        if err != nil && err != io.EOF {
            panic(err)
        }
        if n == 0 {
            break
        }

        // write a chunk
        if _, err := w.Write(buf[:n]); err != nil {
            panic(err)
        }
    }

    if err = w.Flush(); err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
}

bufio is just acting as a buffer here, because we don't have much to do with data. In most other situations (specially with text files) bufio is very useful by giving us a nice API for reading and writing easily and flexibly, while it handles buffering behind the scenes.

Using ioutil

package main

import (
    "io/ioutil"
)

func main() {
    // read the whole file at once
    b, err := ioutil.ReadFile("input.txt")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

    // write the whole body at once
    err = ioutil.WriteFile("output.txt", b, 0644)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
}

Easy as pie! But use it only if you're sure you're not dealing with big files.