The Go Programming Language

13.3 Example: Deep Equivalence

The DeepEqual function from the reflect package reports whether two values are “deeply” equal. DeepEqual compares basic values as if by the built-in == operator; for composite values, it traverses them recursively, comparing corresponding elements. Because it works for any pair of values, even ones that are not comparable with ==, it finds widespread use in tests. The following test uses DeepEqual to compare two []string values:

Click here to view code image

func TestSplit(t *testing.T) {
    got := strings.Split("a:b:c", ":")
    want := []string{"a", "b", "c"};
    if !reflect.DeepEqual(got, want) { /* ... */ }
}

Although DeepEqual is convenient, its distinctions can seem arbitrary. For example, it doesn’t consider a ...