How to Unmarshal simple xml with multiple items in Go?

Question

I would like to get a slice of people ([]People) from the following xml:

<file>
    <person>
        <name>John Doe</name>
        <age>18</age>
    </person>
    <person>
        <name>Jane Doe</name>
        <age>20</age>
    </person>
</file>

(All other similar questions were too specific and verbose)

Answer 1

You need to create two structs:

• one to represent the <file> </file>
• one for the repeating record <person> </person>

Please see the comments inside the code:

package main

import (
    "encoding/xml"
    "fmt"
)

var sourceXML = []byte(`<file>
    <person>
        <name>John Doe</name>
        <age>18</age>
    </person>
    <person>
        <name>Jane Doe</name>
        <age>20</age>
    </person>
</file>`)

// Define a structure for each record
type Person struct {
    Name string `xml:"name"`
    Age  int    `xml:"age"`
}

// There needs to be a single struct to unmarshal into
// File acts like that one root struct
type File struct {
    People []Person `xml:"person"`
}

func main() {
    // Initialize an empty struct
    var file File

    err := xml.Unmarshal(sourceXML, &file)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
    }
    // file.People returns only the []Person rather than the root
    // file struct with it's contents
    fmt.Printf("%+v", file.People)
}
// output:
// [{Name:John Doe Age:18} {Name:Jane Doe Age:20}]

Edit. Kaedys said the File and Person structures can also be nested (using anonymous structs) as follows:

type File struct {
    People []struct {
        Name string `xml:"name"`
        Age  int    `xml:"age"`
    } `xml:"person"`
}