Checking for empty structures while running (check if the structure is empty)

In Go, structs are incredible and powerful composite data types that allow us to group multiple variables of different data types into a single entity.

They play an important role in building real-world applications because they allow us to represent real-world entities as a single entity.

One of the common tasks when working with structures in Go is to check whether the structure is empty or not.

In this tutorial, we will learn about the working of Structures in Go. We will mainly focus on learning how to check if a structure is empty or not.

golang structures

Before we dive deeper into structure copying, let's first understand the basics of structures in Go.

defining a structure

To define a struct in Go, we use the “type” keyword followed by a struct definition. An example of the structure is as follows:

In the given example, we define a structure called “Car” with three main fields: ModelName, Mileage, and Year.

structure instantiation

To create an instance of a struct, we can simply declare a variable of type struct and initialize it using a struct literal.

Example:

In this case, we create an instance of the structure named “c” and assign a value to each field belonging to that instance.

accessing structure fields

We can access the fields of a structure using dot notation as shown in the following example code:

Once we run the given code, it should print the fields and values ​​of the struct instance as follows:

Check empty structure in golang

When we check whether a structure is empty, we essentially determine whether all the fields of the structure are set to their null values.

If all fields of a structure are set to their null value, we consider them empty. Let us delve deeper and discuss the techniques to investigate empty structure.

Method 1: compare to null value

The first technique we will use involves comparing a structure instance to a new instance of the same structure.

This is because when we declare a structure without explicitly initializing its fields, Go automatically sets them to their null value for integers (“” for strings and null for pointers). Is.

Take a look at the following example that demonstrates how to compare structure values:

In the given example, we define a function called “isEmptyStruct” which performs a comparison to check whether the structure is empty or not.

Running the code should return the following output:

Method 2: Using Reflection

Reflection package plays an important role in inspecting types during runtime. When it comes to comparison, it allows us to inspect fields of a structure dynamically by iterating through the fields of the structure.

An example is as follows:

In this example, we iterate over the fields of the structure using a “for” loop. Then we check if the field is equal to “reflect.Zero” which determines if the structure is empty.

conclusion

In this tutorial, we discussed various methods and techniques that we can use to check whether a structure is empty or not.