Use interface{} type and do assertion later

Could you clarify why this is not an acceptable option? It seems to me like the cleanest and easiest.

Also, why is converting all basic types into string useful? If we were to add that feature into the JSON package, it would be natural to also expect it to magically convert strings to ints, ints to floats, string to bool... It sounds to me like this would add a lot of glue code to the json package.

@mvdan I definitely don't think it would be good to do all that magical conversion. I'm coming from the point of view that the data is human readable text to begin with.

My scenario is a 3rd party api that sends fields that are supposed to be strings as both quoted and unquoted.
{"foo": 234} or {"foo": "234"}

I feel it takes a lot of boilerplate to populate a struct with plain string fields since I'll have to have 2 versions of every response format they send, one with interfaces or a custom type for internal unmarshalling, and one with normal primitive strings.

Edit:

I suppose if I could do a type conversion between both structs it wouldn't be too bad but that doesn't seem to work, unless I'm missing something? : https://goplay.space/#uOIJgVeLbp2

Ah, I see that you're after the original bytes, not the values converted to strings.

Seems to me like https://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/#RawMessage would fit the job nicely. It wouldn't limit the accepted values to just basic types - for example, it would also allow objects - but you can likely add your own restrictions by disallowing a leading { byte and so on.

Yeah, RawMessage could work, I'm still back to a lot of boilerplate to convert that into a 'convenient' struct format, a la:

type Inconvenient struct {
    Foo json.RawMessage
    Bar json.RawMessage
}

type Convenient struct {
    Foo string
    Bar string
    ....
}
...
inconvenient := &Inconvenient{}

<some unmarshal or decode here>

c := &Convenient{
    Foo: string(inconvenient.Foo),
    Bar: string(inconvenient.Bar),
...
}

Edit:
I suppose I could generate some 'Inconvenient' structs using templating for this case. Still, since the underlying fields can be easily expressed as text if feels like a lot of hoops just to get the data as string.

It seems like you’ve landed on a solution (albeit one with more boilerplate than you’d prefer). That said, if you’d like to continue with this request, we would need more motivating examples and a concrete proposal.

Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks.

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