Best practice for long string literals in Go

joshlf picture joshlf · Jan 5, 2014 · Viewed 11.3k times · Source

I've got a long string literal in Go:

db.Exec("UPDATE mytable SET (I, Have, Lots, Of, Fields) = ('suchalongvalue', 'thisislongaswell', 'ohmansolong', 'wowsolong', 'loooooooooooooooooooooooooong')")

I see two ways to make this more manageable: raw quotes, or multiple concatenated quotes:

db.Exec(`UPDATE mytable SET (I, Have, Lots, Of, Fields) 
         = ('suchalongvalue', 'thisislongaswell', 'ohmansolong', 
            'wowsolong', 'loooooooooooooooooooooooooong')`)

db.Exec("UPDATE mytable SET (I, Have, Lots, Of, Fields) = " + 
    "('suchalongvalue', 'thisislongaswell', 'ohmansolong', " +
    "'wowsolong', 'loooooooooooooooooooooooooong')")

The first feels more right, but the preceding spaces will be included in the string, making the resulting string have awkward runs of spaces in it. Is either of these considered idiomatic Go?

Answer

captncraig picture captncraig · Apr 8, 2015

It looks weird putting the long string literal in the parameter like that. I would prefer:

const updateQuery=`
UPDATE mytable SET (I, Have, Lots, Of, Fields) 
= ('suchalongvalue', 'thisislongaswell', 'ohmansolong', 
'wowsolong', 'loooooooooooooooooooooooooong')`

func doUpdate(){
  db.Exec(updateQuery)
}

I also prefer a single newline at the beginning to the odd spaces in each line. That way you can kill it with strings.Trim if it causes problems.