I have a piece of code that returns a web page using the built-in template system. It accepts a ResponseWriter
to which the resulting markup is written. I now want to get to the markup as a string and put it in a database in some cases. I factored out a method that accepts a normal Writer
instead of a ResponseWriter
and am now trying to get to the written content. Aha - a Pipe
may be what I need and then I can get the string with ReadString
from the bufio
library. But it turns out that the PipeReader
coming out from the pipe is not compatible with Reader
(that I would need for the ReadString
method). W00t. Big surprise. So I could just read into byte[]s using the PipeReader
but it feels a bit wrong when ReadString
is there.
So what would be the best way to do it? Should I stick with the Pipe
and read bytes or is there something better that I haven't found in the manual?
If your function accepts an io.Writer, you can pass a *bytes.Buffer
to capture the output.
// import "bytes"
buf := new(bytes.Buffer)
f(buf)
buf.String() // returns a string of what was written to it
If it requires an http.ResponseWriter, you can use a *httptest.ResponseRecorder
. A response recorder holds all information that can be sent to a ResponseWriter, but the body is just a *bytes.Buffer
.
// import "net/http/httptest"
r := httptest.NewRecorder()
f(r)
r.Body.String() // r.Body is a *bytes.Buffer