Search code examples
jsongoserializationtagsmarshalling

Lowercase JSON key names with JSON Marshal in Go


I wish to use the "encoding/json" package to marshal a struct declared in one of the imported packages of my application.

Eg.:

type T struct {
    Foo int
}

Because it is imported, all available (exported) fields in the struct begins with an upper case letter. But I wish to have lower case key names:

out, err := json.Marshal(&T{Foo: 42})

will result in

{"Foo":42}

but I wish to get

{"foo":42}

Is it possible to get around the problem in some easy way?


Solution

  • Have a look at the docs for encoding/json.Marshal. It discusses using struct field tags to determine how the generated json is formatted.

    For example:

    type T struct {
        FieldA int    `json:"field_a"`
        FieldB string `json:"field_b,omitempty"`
    }
    

    This will generate JSON as follows:

    {
        "field_a": 1234,
        "field_b": "foobar"
    }