Golang Debug Bytes

When working with raw bytes in Golang it can be a little difficult to debug. If you are new to the language or just want to quickly check some data as a human readable text blob it is useful to have a technique for doing this.

For a today I learned moment I found a useful way to get a quick debugging of those pesky bytes. Even when trying to debug from your tests you can get a good output of the data you are trying to look into. The technique involves making a new Buffer that will write to STDOUT.

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	message := []byte("My super secret message for you to read!\n")
	io.Copy(os.Stdout, bytes.NewBuffer(message))
	fmt.Printf("%+v\n", message)
}

Which results in the following output:

My super secret message for you to read!
[77 121 32 115 117 112 101 114 32 115 101 99 114 101 116 32 109 101 115 115 97 103 101 32 102 111 114 32 121 111 117 32 116 111 32 114 101 97 100 33 10]

This technique works because the new bytes Buffer is set up with both write and read methods. If you notice the Printf line attempting to debug the same bytes is actually printing out the raw bytes. Some might notice that you can easily wrap that message in a string cast as fmt.Printf("%+v\n", string(message)) which will definitely work. The io.Copy technique comes in handy if you aren’t getting log or fmt print statements printed out, such as from tests. Since I found this useful when recently needing to debug some bytes I thought I would share.

• golang
• til