Why request.Body is empty after decoding or reading?

[cyantarek]

I came across a weird problem. Please see the code below:

var p Person

data, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(r.Body) //data will not be empty

json.NewDecoder(r.Body).Decode(&p) //it will be empty upon reading

fmt.Println(p.ID) //will be empty

json.NewDecoder(r.Body).Decode(&p) //will not be empty

body, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(r.Body) //it will be empty upon reading

fmt.Println(p.ID) //will not be empty

As you can see from the code, if I read the r.Body first, then check it, it is empty. Why does it become empty after reading from the IO stream?

[NobbZ (Norbert Melzer)]

Sorry, but from your code I can see, that the body seems to be available again after it has been disappeared already.

But I will just pretend your code isn’t there at all and I will assume, that you are talking about a requests body in an http-handler.

So r.Body is a io.ReadCloser, a readable stream of bytes, which is empty after it has been consumed. This is just how any io.Reader works.