How to customize JSON encoding output in Go?

Question

I want to customize encoding format of a struct but got error: json: error calling MarshalJSON for type main.Info: invalid character 'o' in literal false (expecting 'a') What's wrong with my code?

package main

import (
    "bytes"
    "encoding/json"
    "fmt"
    "log"
)

type Info struct {
    name string
    flag bool
}

func (i Info) MarshalJSON() ([]byte, error) {
    var b bytes.Buffer
    b.Write([]byte(i.name))
    if i.flag {
        b.Write([]byte(`"true"`))
    } else {
        b.Write([]byte(`"false"`))
    }   
    return b.Bytes(), nil 
}

func main() {
    a := []Info{
        {"foo", true},
        {"bar", false},
    }   
    out, err := json.Marshal(a)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    fmt.Printf(string(out))
}

Answer 1

Your code produces invalid JSON text.

You should write the names of the fields too, and for safety quote both the field names and string values but don't quote bool values (else the Go json package will not unmarshal it into bool for example). Also enclose your values in brackets {} like this:

b.Write([]byte(`{"name":"`))       // started with {
b.Write([]byte(i.name))
b.Write([]byte(`","flag":`))       // note the , between values
if i.flag {
    b.Write([]byte(`true`))        // don't quote boolean value
} else {
    b.Write([]byte(`false`))       // don't quote boolean value
}
b.Write([]byte(`}`))               // must close with }

Output (try the complete application on the Go Playground):

[{"name":"foo","flag":true},{"name":"bar","flag":false}]

But since you're not doing anything special during marshal, just export the fields (by starting them with upper-case letters) and the json package will marshal/unmarshal it for you automatically:

type Info struct {
    Name string
    Flag bool
}

Try this version on the Go Playground.

Output (note the upper-cased names "Name" and "Flag"):

[{"Name":"foo","Flag":true},{"Name":"bar","Flag":false}]

You can also use tags if you want to use different names in the JSON text like this:

type Info struct {
    Name string `json:"name"`
    Flag bool   `json:"flag"`
}

This will again produce an output with lower-cased names:

[{"name":"foo","flag":true},{"name":"bar","flag":false}]

Read the documentation of the json.Marshal() function to see what other options and customizations you can do with struct tags.