Scribd
Upload
50 views8 pages

Reading Files: .TXT .CSV

The document discusses reading from and writing to files in Go. It demonstrates how to read the contents of a file into memory using ioutil.ReadFile(), write a byte array to a new file using ioutil.WriteFile(), and append additional data to an existing file by opening it with os.OpenFile() and using the WriteString() method. The techniques shown are format-agnostic and can be used to read and write various file types like .txt, .csv, and .xls.

Uploaded by

Rahul Singh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
50 views8 pages

Reading Files: .TXT .CSV

The document discusses reading from and writing to files in Go. It demonstrates how to read the contents of a file into memory using ioutil.ReadFile(), write a byte array to a new file using ioutil.WriteFile(), and append additional data to an existing file by opening it with os.OpenFile() and using the WriteString() method. The techniques shown are format-agnostic and can be used to read and write various file types like .txt, .csv, and .xls.

Uploaded by

Rahul Singh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 8

The method we are going to use to read and write to these files will be file

format-agnostic. What this means is that you’ll be able to use the techniques
we’ll be covering in order to read and write, .txt, .csv, .xls and so on, the
only thing that differs for these files is the structure of the data that you write
to each of these file types.

Reading Files
In order to read from files on your local file system, you’ll have to use
the io/ioutil module. You’ll first have to pull of the contents of a file into
memory by calling ioutil.Read File("/path//my/file.ext")  which will take
in the path to the file you wish to read in as it’s only parameter. This will return
either the data of the file, or an error which can be handled as you normally
handle errors in go.

Create a new file called main.go as well as another file called localfile.data.


Add a random piece of text to the .data file so that our finished go program
has something to read and then do the following:

package main

// import the 2 modules we need

import (

"fmt"
"io/ioutil"

func main() {

// read in the contents of the localfile.data

data, err := ioutil.ReadFile("localfile.data")

// if our program was unable to read the file

// print out the reason why it can't

if err != nil {

fmt.Println(err)

// if it was successful in reading the file then

// print out the contents as a string

fmt.Print(string(data))

Once you have added this go code to your main.go file, try running it by


calling:

> go run main.go


this has all my content%

As you can see, we’ve successfully managed to read all of the data stored
within our proprietary localfile.data file type.

Writing Files to New Files


Now that we’ve covered reading from files in Go, it’s time to look at creating
and writing to our own files!

In order to write content to files using Go, we’ll again have to leverage
the io/ioutil module. We’ll first have to construct a byte array that represents
the content we wish to store within our files.

mydata := []byte("all my data I want to write to a file")

Once we have constructed this byte array, we can then


call ioutil.WriteFile() to write this byte array to a file.
The WriteFile() method takes in 3 different parameters, the first is the
location of the file we wish to write to, the second is our mydata object, and
the third is the FileMode, which represents our file’s mode and permission bits.

// the WriteFile method returns an error if unsuccessful

err := ioutil.WriteFile("myfile.data", mydata, 0777)

// handle this error

if err != nil {

// print it out

fmt.Println(err)

}
Let’s expand our original main.go file to not only read, but to write to a file as
well:

package main

import (

"fmt"

"io/ioutil"

func main() {

mydata := []byte("All the data I wish to write to a file")

// the WriteFile method returns an error if unsuccessful

err := ioutil.WriteFile("myfile.data", mydata, 0777)

// handle this error

if err != nil {

// print it out

fmt.Println(err)

}
data, err := ioutil.ReadFile("myfile.data")

if err != nil {

fmt.Println(err)

fmt.Print(string(data))

If you attempt to run this now by calling go run main.go, you should see that
a new file is automatically created within your current directory
called myfile.data and our go program proceeds to read from this newly
created file and prints the contents in the console:

➜ go run main.go

All the data I wish to write to a file

Writing to Existing File


What happens if we have an existing file that we want to write additional
information to?

Let’s take a look at that now.


package main

import (

"fmt"

"io/ioutil"

"os"

func main() {

mydata := []byte("All the data I wish to write to a file\n")

// the WriteFile method returns an error if unsuccessful

err := ioutil.WriteFile("myfile.data", mydata, 0777)

// handle this error

if err != nil {

// print it out

fmt.Println(err)

}
data, err := ioutil.ReadFile("myfile.data")

if err != nil {

fmt.Println(err)

fmt.Print(string(data))

f, err := os.OpenFile("myfile.data", os.O_APPEND|os.O_WRONLY, 0600)

if err != nil {

panic(err)

defer f.Close()

if _, err = f.WriteString("new data that wasn't there originally\n"); err != nil {

panic(err)

data, err = ioutil.ReadFile("myfile.data")

if err != nil {

fmt.Println(err)
}

fmt.Print(string(data))

Now that you have added the new code, we can test it out by running
our main.go file:

$ go run main.go

All the data I wish to write to a file

new data that wasn't there originally

And Voila! We have successfully managed to append to an existing file


using os.OpenFile and the f.WriteString() method.

File Permissions
It’s incredibly important to understand the various different file permissions
available to you when you are writing to new files.

You might also like