Parsing XML with CDATA using Go

Question

I am new in Golang and I've been trying to parse an xml in Go by defining structs and using xml.Unmarshal.There's no error thrown but the struct is empty. this is my xml:

var bodyXML = []byte('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<smsBatchResponse>
 <ok>
  <![CDATA[CHECK_OK]]>
 </ok>
</smsBatchResponse>')

and this is my code:

type SmsBatchResponse struct {
    Ok string `xml:"ok"`
}

var result SmsBatchResponse

xml.Unmarshal(bodyXML,result)
fmt.Println(result)

Answer 1

The first thing you should do is not ignore any errors that xml.Unmarshal can give you:

if err := xml.Unmarshal(bodyXML, result); err != nil {
    fmt.Println(err)
}

This will (eventually) give you a number of errors:

Error number 1: By default, the XML decoder wants the XML to be encoded in UTF-8. You are providing ISO-8859-1. This can either be trivially fixed by changing your XML encoding to UTF-8; or by manually creating a xml.Decoder and settings the CharsetReader member.

Error number 2: When unmarshalling, the XML decoder expects a pointer , because it needs to modify the passed in struct:

if err := xml.Unmarshal(bodyXML, &result); err != nil {
    ....
}

Note the & in front of result.

When you fix these errors, the XML unmarshals fine.

I have created a fully working example on the Go Playground