I am looking for an elegant way to unzip a list of arguments in Go. I do not want to use a variadic function for that purpose because in my usecase when writing a function I already know the number of arguments and I want to keep that part simple. However in my usecase the parameters arrive as []interface{}
. I could not find a solution but hey maybe someone out there already knows how to do that?
package main
import (
"fmt"
)
// NON-VARIADIC greater
func greet(n1, n2 string) {
fmt.Printf("%s %s
", n1, n2)
}
func main() {
l := []interface{}{"hello", "world"}
// works
greet(l[0].(string), l[1].(string))
// does not work: "./args.go:20: not enough arguments in call to greet"
//greet(l...)
// is there something more elegant to unzip the list?
}
You could create a "generic" caller using reflect package, although this comes with overhead and lacks type safety. Unless you have some special case situation and don't know what you want to call in the code, it would be wiser to use the snippet from your question which works, but you consider not elegant.
Example usage of reflect which could be your starting point:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"reflect"
)
func call(f interface{}, args []interface{}) {
// Convert arguments to reflect.Value
vs := make([]reflect.Value, len(args))
for n := range args {
vs[n] = reflect.ValueOf(args[n])
}
// Call it. Note it panics if f is not callable or arguments don't match
reflect.ValueOf(f).Call(vs)
}
func greet(n1, n2 string) {
fmt.Printf("%s %s
", n1, n2)
}
func main() {
l := []interface{}{"hello", "world"}
call(greet, l)
}
// Output: hello world
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to do. If you want a way to easily pass a slice of two empty interfaces to a function that accepts two strings, you can create a little helper:
func twoStrings(vs []interface{}) (string, string) {
return vs[0].(string), vs[1].(string)
}
Use it as
greet(twoStrings(l))
Playground: http://play.golang.org/p/R8KFwMUT_V.
But honestly, it seems like you're doing something wrong, trying to make the Go type system to do something it cannot do.