golang XML not unmarshal-ing properly

Question

The XML format I need to unmarshal is as follows:

data := ` <table> <name> <code>23764</code> <name>Smith, Jane</name> </name> <name> <code>11111</code> <name>Doe, John</name> </name> </table> `

I have attempted the following structs and code to no avail:

type Customers struct { XMLName xml.Name `xml:"table"` Custs []Customer } type Customer struct { XMLName xml.Name `xml:"name"` Code string `xml:"code"` Name string `xml:"name"` } ... var custs Customers err := xml.Unmarshal([]byte(data), &custs) if err != nil { fmt.Printf("error: %v", err) return } fmt.Printf("%v", custs) for _, cust := range custs.Custs { fmt.Printf("Cust:\n%v\n", cust) }

The range prints nothing out, and printing custs only gives me {{ table} []}

nemo · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-17 19:15:45Z

The correct structure is the following:

type Customer struct { Code string `xml:"code"` Name string `xml:"name"` } type Customers struct { Customers []Customer `xml:"name"` }

You can try it on the playground here. The problem is that you don't assign the xml tag for []Customer.

The way you solved this, using xml.Name is also correct but more verbose. You can review working code here. If you need to use the xml.Name field for some reason, I would recommend using a private field so that an exported version of the struct is not cluttered.

Brilliant - that does work. For some reason I thought I had to use XMLName to denote the title of the field if it didn't match.
The purpose for using xml.Name is to override the parent tag at runtime as it's value is regarded as well. So you can use the value of the xml.Name for the table structure and re-use the Customers struct for some similar looking XML structure with a different parent tag name.

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