[Golang] Introduction to Variables

Decaliring Variables

Let's update the hello.go example with a variable as following.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    var message string = "Hello world!"
    fmt.Println(message)
}

A variable declairation is composed of 3 components:

Go is Static Tye language. It cares the type of value that is going to be assigned to a variable. You can not assign a different type of value to a variable. for example:

var message string = "Hello world"
message = 100 // ERROR! You can not assign a integer value to a string variable

Default Value

Any variable declared without an initial value will have a default value assigned.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	var message string
	fmt.Println(message)

	message = "Hello world!"
	fmt.Println(message)
}

Type Inference

Although Go is a Statically typed language, you do not need to specify the type of every variable you declare.
You can use := to create a new varibale.
Go compiler will analysis the type of value and define the varible type as same as the value.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	// var hello string = "Hello world"
	message := "Hello World"
	message = "Hello Taiwan!"
	fmt.Println(hello)
}

Name Convention

The convention in Go is to use MixedCaps or mixedCaps (simply camelCase) rather than underscores to write multi-word names.

Type Conversion

Numeric types conversion

Golang doesn’t allow you to mix numeric types in an expression. For example:

a := 2021
b := 3.1415

result := a + b // Error (invalid operation: mismatched types int and float64)

result := float64(a) + b // Works

String and other basic data types conversion:

Use the strconv package to conversions to/from string representations of basic data types

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"reflect"
	"strconv"
)

func main() {
	// Convert String to Bool, Float, Integer
	b, err := strconv.ParseBool("true")
	fmt.Println(b, err, reflect.TypeOf(b))

	f, err := strconv.ParseFloat("3.1415", 64)
	fmt.Println(f, err, reflect.TypeOf(f))

	i, err := strconv.ParseInt("-42", 10, 64)
	fmt.Println(i, err, reflect.TypeOf(i))

	// Convert Bool, Float, Integer to String.
	sb := strconv.FormatBool(b)
	sf := strconv.FormatFloat(f, 'G', -1, 64)
	si := strconv.FormatInt(i, 10)

	fmt.Printf(sb + "\t" + sf + "\t" + si + "\n")
}

Constants Variables

We can declair constant variables to represent fixed values

for example

const capital string = "Taipei"
const population2020 int32 = 23568378
const (
	a = 5 + population2020 // Valid
	b = population2020 / 5 // Valid
)

func main() {
	fmt.Printf("Hello %s !\n", capital)
	fmt.Printf("Taiwan's Population: %d!\n", population2020)
}

Access Environment Variables

https://www.callicoder.com/go-read-write-environment-variables/

Sometime, we need to access the system environment variable at runtine so that we can make the same application work in different environments like Dev, UAT, and Production.

The os packages provide functions to work with environment variables, such as:

for example:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	// Set Environment Variables
	os.Setenv("DB_HOST", "localhost")
	os.Setenv("DB_USER", "admin")
	os.Setenv("DB_PASS", "test123")

	// Get Environment Variables
	user := os.Getenv("DB_USER")
	pass := os.Getenv("DB_PASS")
	fmt.Printf("Host: %s, Port: %s\n", user, pass)

	// Unset Environment Variable
	os.Unsetenv("DB_HOST")
	fmt.Printf("Try to get host: %s\n", os.Getenv("DB_HOST"))


	// Get the value of an environment variable and a boolean indicating whether the environment variable is set or not.
	database, ok := os.LookupEnv("DB_NAME")
	if !ok {
		fmt.Println("DB_NAME is not present")
	} else {
		fmt.Printf("Database Name: %s\n", database)
	}
}