Null strings in Go

[Michael Hoisie]

Most languages support the concept of null string values. Java, C/C++/
C#, javascript, etc.

For interoperability reasons it would be useful if Go supported a null
string value.

For instance, in the json package, Marshal and Unmarshal can't really
work with null strings. If you run the following code, the result is
not really correct:

var a struct{ A string} { };
json.Unmarshal(`{"a": null}`, &a);
fmt.Printf("%q", a.A); // prints "", which is is not technically
correct. null != ""

There's also question recently on stack overflow about this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1799374/how-to-have-a-function-with-a-nullable-string-parameter-in-go

Is there a plan to support null strings in Go?

- Mike

[roger peppe]

2009/11/25 Michael Hoisie <hoi...@gmail.com>:

> For interoperability reasons it would be useful if Go supported a null
> string value.

if you want a nullable string value, you can just use *string.

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Or []byte.

Ian