How to parse rails style form params

[lcowell (Luke Cowell)]

I was looking at gorilla/schema and I was wondering if there was something similar that can parse rails style params.

eg gorilla/schema can parse

user.1.phone
user.2.phone
user.1.email
user.2.email
user.first_name
user.last_name

I need something that can parse

user[]phone
user[]phone
user[]email
user[]email
user[first_name]
user[last_name]

Does such a thing exist or is this something I’ll need to write myself?

edit: added more examples

[Giulio_Iotti]

Parsing is done by stdlib net/http: call req.ParseForm.

Then you’ll have all values in req.PostForm in net/url.Values (which is a map of names and array of values for duplicated names).

If you need to rearrange them, do it yourself, but given the format you described, I think you don’t even need to.

[lcowell (Luke Cowell)]

Thanks for the response. I’m thinking more about parsing those form variable names and values in to some data structure. Unless I’m overlooked something I don’t think that req.ParseForm does that. Any other ideas?

[nerdyworm (Benjamin Rhodes)]

Given the following form element:

<input type="text" name="user[name]" value="bob">

Rails would turn that into:

params // { user: { name: "bob" } }

Go would turn that into

request.FormValue("user[name]") // "bob" 

Besides gorilla/schema I have not seen a lib that handles this kind of data transformation automagically.

It’s completely possible, however you will have to roll this yourself. Sorry

Another option would be to submit the form as a json so you could declare the shape of the request:

type UserParams struct {
    User struct {
        Name string
    }
}

// in http handler
json.NewDecoder(request.Body).Decode(&params)
params.User.Name  // bob

That may not be an option for you, but just throwing it out there.

Cheers
Ben

[lcowell (Luke Cowell)]

Thanks for the detailed response. I may look at updating/forking scheme to handle rails style params. The json suggestion is a good one too and it’s what I have done for now.