Golang struct tags gotchas

In golang while using struct tag, the spaces make a lot of difference. For example look at the following code.

type PodStatus struct {
	Status string `json: ",status"`
}

If you run go vet on this piece of code you will get following error:

$ go vet types.go 
# command-line-arguments
./types.go:28: struct field tag `json: ",status"` 
not compatible with reflect.StructTag.Get: bad syntax for struct tag value

Now this does not tell us what is wrong with the struct tag, json: ",status". The problem with this struct tag is that the extra space can be interpreted as delimiter so provide key-value pair without space.

So if the struct changes from:

`json: ",status"`

to

`json:",status"`

So the change is just the space after json:, now we don’t see the error.

More information about the struct tags can be found in this elaborated blog post named: Tags in Golang.