How to get JSON response from http.Get

Question

I'm trying read JSON data from web, but that code returns empty result. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

package main

import "os"
import "fmt"
import "net/http"
import "io/ioutil"
import "encoding/json"

type Tracks struct {
    Toptracks []Toptracks_info
}

type Toptracks_info struct {
    Track []Track_info
    Attr  []Attr_info
}

type Track_info struct {
    Name       string
    Duration   string
    Listeners  string
    Mbid       string
    Url        string
    Streamable []Streamable_info
    Artist     []Artist_info
    Attr       []Track_attr_info
}

type Attr_info struct {
    Country    string
    Page       string
    PerPage    string
    TotalPages string
    Total      string
}

type Streamable_info struct {
    Text      string
    Fulltrack string
}

type Artist_info struct {
    Name string
    Mbid string
    Url  string
}

type Track_attr_info struct {
    Rank string
}

func get_content() {
    // json data
    url := "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=geo.gettoptracks&api_key=c1572082105bd40d247836b5c1819623&format=json&country=Netherlands"

    res, err := http.Get(url)

    if err != nil {
        panic(err.Error())
    }

    body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(res.Body)

    if err != nil {
        panic(err.Error())
    }

    var data Tracks
    json.Unmarshal(body, &data)
    fmt.Printf("Results: %v\n", data)
    os.Exit(0)
}

func main() {
    get_content()
}

Answer 1

The ideal way is not to use ioutil.ReadAll, but rather use a decoder on the reader directly. Here's a nice function that gets a url and decodes its response onto a target structure.

var myClient = &http.Client{Timeout: 10 * time.Second}

func getJson(url string, target interface{}) error {
    r, err := myClient.Get(url)
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    defer r.Body.Close()

    return json.NewDecoder(r.Body).Decode(target)
}

Example use:

type Foo struct {
    Bar string
}

func main() {
    foo1 := new(Foo) // or &Foo{}
    getJson("http://example.com", foo1)
    println(foo1.Bar)

    // alternately:

    foo2 := Foo{}
    getJson("http://example.com", &foo2)
    println(foo2.Bar)
}

You should not be using the default *http.Client structure in production as this answer originally demonstrated! (Which is what http.Get/etc call to). The reason is that the default client has no timeout set; if the remote server is unresponsive, you're going to have a bad day.