Access HTTP response as string in Go

Question

I'd like to parse the response of a web request, but I'm getting trouble accessing it as string.

func main() {
    resp, err := http.Get("http://google.hu/")
    if err != nil {
        // handle error
    }
    defer resp.Body.Close()
    body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)

    ioutil.WriteFile("dump", body, 0600)

    for i:= 0; i < len(body); i++ {
        fmt.Println( body[i] ) // This logs uint8 and prints numbers
    }

    fmt.Println( reflect.TypeOf(body) )
    fmt.Println("done")
}

How can I access the response as string? ioutil.WriteFile writes correctly the response to a file.

I've already checked the package reference but it's not really helpful.

Answer 1

bs := string(body) should be enough to give you a string.

From there, you can use it as a regular string.

A bit as in this thread:

var client http.Client
resp, err := client.Get(url)
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
defer resp.Body.Close()

if resp.StatusCode == http.StatusOK {
    bodyBytes, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    bodyString := string(bodyBytes)
    log.Info(bodyString)
}

See also GoByExample.

As commented below (and in zzn's answer), this is a conversion (see spec).
See "How expensive is []byte(string)?" (reverse problem, but the same conclusion apply) where zzzz mentioned:

Some conversions are the same as a cast, like uint(myIntvar), which just reinterprets the bits in place.

Sonia adds:

Making a string out of a byte slice, definitely involves allocating the string on the heap. The immutability property forces this.
Sometimes you can optimize by doing as much work as possible with []byte and then creating a string at the end. The bytes.Buffer type is often useful.

Answer 2

The method you're using to read the http body response returns a byte slice:

func ReadAll(r io.Reader) ([]byte, error)

official documentation

You can convert []byte to a string by using

body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
bodyString := string(body)

Answer 3

string(byteslice) will convert byte slice to string, just know that it's not only simply type conversion, but also memory copy.