How can I use the "compress/gzip" package to gzip a file?

Question

I'm new to Go, and can't figure out how to use the compress/gzip package to my advantage. Basically, I just want to write something to a file, gzip it and read it directly from the zipped format through another script. I would really appreciate if someone could give me an example on how to do this.

Answer 1

All the compress packages implement the same interface. You would use something like this to compress:

var b bytes.Buffer
w := gzip.NewWriter(&b)
w.Write([]byte("hello, world\n"))
w.Close()

And this to unpack:

r, err := gzip.NewReader(&b)
io.Copy(os.Stdout, r)
r.Close()

Answer 2

Pretty much the same answer as Laurent, but with the file io:

import (
  "bytes"
  "compress/gzip"
  "io/ioutil"
)
// ...
var b bytes.Buffer
w := gzip.NewWriter(&b)
w.Write([]byte("hello, world\n"))
w.Close() // You must close this first to flush the bytes to the buffer.
err := ioutil.WriteFile("hello_world.txt.gz", b.Bytes(), 0666)