Prevent Go's json.Marshal from coercing string to valid UTF-8 unicode?

Question

I'm trying to POST some JSON to a server using Go where special characters like ampersand must exist intact in the JSON string I'm sending.

http://play.golang.org/p/bPt9kl88-y

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "encoding/json"
)

func main() {

    type TransactionStatement struct {
        Query      string                 
    }

    statement := &TransactionStatement{
        Query:       "my query with this & that",
    }
    data, _ := json.Marshal(statement)

    fmt.Printf("> %v", string(data))
}

Go's json.Marshal is converting certain characters like '&' to unicode. Which is great:

String values encode as JSON strings coerced to valid UTF-8, replacing invalid bytes with the Unicode replacement rune. The angle brackets "<" and ">" are escaped to "\u003c" and "\u003e" to keep some browsers from misinterpreting JSON output as HTML. Ampersand "&" is also escaped to "\u0026" for the same reason. Blockquote

It may sound rediculous but the JSON I'm sending is for a database query using a RESTful endpoint, where this literal string will be used to perform a freetext database query - so I can't use unicode since it's interpreted literally.

So is there any way to prevent this conversion to unicode? Or will I just have to undo these replacements after the marshaling is done?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can choose not to encode if you wish: https://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/#Encoder.SetEscapeHTML

https://play.golang.org/p/gfy1WaDrEIH