Job Ready Go

Lesson 11Organizing with Structs

Up to this point, you've used a variety of individual variables. When it has come to grouping or relating variables, you've learned about arrays, which group a number of values of the same type under a single variable name. There are also times when you want to associate a number of different variables to a single group. For instance, you can create a bank account item with fields that represent information about a bank account, such as an account holder, an account number, and a balance.

A struct is a data structure that includes a list of fields. Structs are an important aspect of any programming language in that they allow you to organize a group of variables into a related unit such as an account. This lesson takes a close look at the use of structs in Go.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Understand how a struct can be used.
• Create your own structs.
• Retrieve elements from a struct.
• Modify the values in a struct.
• Use functions (methods) with a struct.
• Compare structs.

DECLARING AND INITIALIZING A STRUCT

Structs allow you to create complex data types. A struct in Go can contain one or more fields. Each field in the struct must have a data type. You can use the struct keyword to create a struct using syntax like this:

type structName struct {
   field1 string
   field2 float64
[…]
}

Listing 11.1 creates a struct named account with two fields, accountNumber and balance, and assigns a value to each of ...