mapstructure is a Go library for decoding generic map values to structures and vice versa, while providing helpful error handling.
This library is most useful when decoding values from some data stream (JSON, Gob, etc.) where you don't quite know the structure of the underlying data until you read a part of it. You can therefore read a map[string]interface{} and use this library to decode it into the proper underlying native Go structure.
import "mapstructure" type Person struct { name string age uint emails []string } // You can imagine that the "input" comes from some external source // such as decoding JSON or something. input := map[string]interface{}{ "name": "Mitchell", "age": 91, "emails": []string{"foo@bar.com", "bar@baz.com"}, } var result Person err := mapstructure.Decode(input, &result) if err != nil { panic(err) } // The value of "result" now contains what you would expect. The decoding // process is properly type-checked and human-friendly errors are returned, // if any.