Escaping a dot in a template variable

[gjrussell (Geoff Russell)]

I am feeding data from an external json source (over which I have no control) into a template. But some of the names have dot’s in them. So I end up with a template
variable {{.Map.first.name}} where “first.name” is a key in Map. How do I escape the dot? Or is there
some other trick? I’ve tried {{.Map.“first.name”}} but that produces a panic (bad character ‘"’).

Here is a sample program that illustrates the problem.

Many thanks

package main

import (
        "os"
        "text/template"
        "time"
)

const atemplate = `Look at this:
{{range .}} {{.Name}} {{.Count }} 
{{.JoinDate}} {{.JoinString}} {{.Map.post.code}}
{{end}}`

type Record struct {
        Name       string
        Count      int
        JoinDate   time.Time
        JoinString string
        Map        map[string]string
}

func main() {
        tmpl, err := template.New("test").Parse(atemplate)
        if err != nil {
                panic(err)
        }
        var r []Record
        r = append(r, Record{
                Name:       "Suzanne",
                Count:      236,
                JoinDate:   time.Date(2009, time.November, 10, 23, 0, 0, 0, time.Local),
                JoinString: "rs",
                Map:        map[string]string{"key": "value", "post.code": "5068"},
        })
        err = tmpl.Execute(os.Stdout, r)
        if err != nil {
                panic(err)
        }
}

[NobbZ (Norbert Melzer)]

You should be able to use index function in the template.

{{index .Map "post.code"}}

Or, if you know the keys in advance, don’t dump into a map[string]string, but unmarshall into a properly defined struct.

type TheForeignJson struct {
  PostCode string `json:"post.code"`
}

type Record struct {
        Name       string
        Count      int
        JoinDate   time.Time
        JoinString string
        Map        TheForeignJson
}

[gjrussell (Geoff Russell)]

Many thanks. Your solution {{index … }} works in my test code, but not in the real code … so the structure I’m working with is obviously different from what I think it is! The data is coming from the github.com/stripe/stripe-go module. I have to dig deeper

[NobbZ (Norbert Melzer)]

The only occurrence of a key that starts with post on the API documentation page was a postal_code.

[gjrussell (Geoff Russell)]

Yes … the problem isn’t with the Stripe variables … but with a bunch of metadata variables being added by other applications. Stripe lets clients add metadata maps and I’m trying to summarise charge data generated by 3 different applications all of which use different names in the metadata … and some of the names have dots and some have spaces.

But I’ve discovered my wrong assumption in the structure and the “index” function works fine. Many thanks.