cannot convert data (type interface {}) to type string: need type assertion

by

I am pretty new to go and I was playing with this notify package.

At first I had code that looked like this:

func doit(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    notify.Post("my_event", "Hello World!")
    fmt.Fprint(w, "+OK")
}

I wanted to append newline to Hello World! but not in the function doit above, because that would be pretty trivial, but in the handler afterwards like this below:

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    myEventChan := make(chan interface{})
    notify.Start("my_event", myEventChan)
    data := <-myEventChan
    fmt.Fprint(w, data + "\n")
}

After go run:

$ go run lp.go 
# command-line-arguments
./lp.go:15: invalid operation: data + "\n" (mismatched types interface {} and string)

After a little bit of Googling I found this question on SO.

Then I updated my code to:

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    myEventChan := make(chan interface{})
    notify.Start("my_event", myEventChan)
    data := <-myEventChan
    s:= data.(string) + "\n"
    fmt.Fprint(w, s)
}

Is this what I was supposed to do? My compiler errors are gone so I guess that’s pretty good? Is this efficient? Should you do it differently?

5 Answers
5

Leave a Comment