int16 to byte array

Question

I'm trying to convert a int16 to a byte array but i cant seem to get it to work.
Here is what i've got right now:

int16 i := 41
a := []byte(string(i))//this line is wrong

Also if someone wonder the array needs to be a length of 2.

Answer 1

While FUZxxl's answer works, you can also use the encoding/binary package:

var i int16 = 41
b := make([]byte, 2)
binary.LittleEndian.PutUint16(b, uint16(i))

The encoding/binary package has prebuilt functions for encoding little and big endian for all fixed size integers and some easy to use functions if you are using Readers and Writers instead of byte slices. Example:

var i int16 = 41
err := binary.Write(w, binary.LittleEndian, i)

Answer 2

If you want to get the bytes of an int16, try something like this:

var i int16 = 41
var h, l uint8 = uint8(i>>8), uint8(i&0xff)

Go tries to make it difficult to write programs that depend on attributes of your platform such as byte order. Thence, type punning that leads to such dependencies (such as overlaying a byte-array with an int16) is forbidden.

In case you really want to shoot yourself in the foot, try the package unsafe.