Access HTTP response as string in Go

Question

bs := string(body) should be enough to give you a string.

From there, you can use it as a regular string.

A bit as in this thread
(updated after Go 1.16 -- Q1 2021 -- ioutil deprecation: ioutil.ReadAll() => io.ReadAll()):

var client http.Client
resp, err := client.Get(url)
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
defer resp.Body.Close()

if resp.StatusCode == http.StatusOK {
    bodyBytes, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    bodyString := string(bodyBytes)
    log.Info(bodyString)
}

See also GoByExample.

As commented below (and in zzn's answer), this is a conversion (see spec).
See "How expensive is []byte(string)?" (reverse problem, but the same conclusion apply) where zzzz mentioned:

Some conversions are the same as a cast, like uint(myIntvar), which just reinterprets the bits in place.

Sonia adds:

Making a string out of a byte slice, definitely involves allocating the string on the heap. The immutability property forces this.
Sometimes you can optimize by doing as much work as possible with []byte and then creating a string at the end. The bytes.Buffer type is often useful.

The method you're using to read the http body response returns a byte slice:

func ReadAll(r io.Reader) ([]byte, error)

official documentation

You can convert []byte to a string by using

body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
bodyString := string(body)

string(byteslice) will convert byte slice to string, just know that it's not only simply type conversion, but also memory copy.

Go 1.16+ update (February 2021)

Deprecation of io/ioutil

code should be

var client http.Client
resp, err := client.Get(url)
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
defer resp.Body.Close()

if resp.StatusCode == http.StatusOK {
    bodyBytes, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    // if u want to read the body many time
    // u need to restore 
    // reader := io.NopCloser(bytes.NewReader(bodyBytes))
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    bodyString := string(bodyBytes)
    log.Info(bodyString)
}

reference

1. https://golang.org/doc/go1.16#ioutil
2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/52076748/2876087