The Go Programming Language

1.5 Fetching a URL

For many applications, access to information from the Internet is as important as access to the local file system. Go provides a collection of packages, grouped under net, that make it easy to send and receive information through the Internet, make low-level network connections, and set up servers, for which Go’s concurrency features (introduced in Chapter 8) are particularly useful.

To illustrate the minimum necessary to retrieve information over HTTP, here’s a simple program called fetch that fetches the content of each specified URL and prints it as uninterpreted text; it’s inspired by the invaluable utility curl. Obviously one would usually do more with such data, but this shows the basic idea. We will use this program ...