Converting string to integer with error handling - strconv, Itoa

• strconv

• Itoa

• nil

• strconv

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"strconv"
)

func main() {
	var i int
	var err error

	i, err = strconv.Atoi("42")
	if err == nil {
		fmt.Printf("%v %T\n", i, i) // 42 int
	} else {
		fmt.Println(err)
	}

	i, err = strconv.Atoi("23\n")
	if err == nil {
		fmt.Printf("%v %T\n", i, i)
	} else {
		fmt.Println(err) // strconv.Atoi: parsing "23\n": invalid syntax
	}

	i, err = strconv.Atoi("17x")
	if err == nil {
		fmt.Printf("%v %T\n", i, i)
	} else {
		fmt.Println(err) // strconv.Atoi: parsing "17x": invalid syntax
	}
}

42 int
strconv.Atoi: parsing "23\n": invalid syntax
strconv.Atoi: parsing "17x": invalid syntax

This can, of course go wrong. If we ask for an integer and the user types in "42x" or even "FooBar". So the conversion might fail. The way Go usually handles errors is by returning a second value which is the special value nil if everything went fine, or the error object is something broke. It is the responsibility of the caller to check the error. So in the follwing examples you can see that from each function we accept two values, the actual value we are interested in and another value that we assign to a variable called err. It is not a special name, but it is quite common in Go to use the variable name err for this purpose.

Then in each one of the example we check if the value of err is equal to nil or if there was an error in the conversion.