Unit testing http json response in Golang

Question

I am using gin as my http server and sending back an empty array in json as my response:

c.JSON(http.StatusOK, []string{})

The resulting json string I get is "[]\n". The newline is added by the json Encoder object, see here.

Using goconvey, I could test my json like

So(response.Body.String(), ShouldEqual, "[]\n")

But is there a better way to generate the expected json string than just adding a newline to all of them?

Answer 1

You should first unmarshal the body of the response into a struct and compare against the resulting object. Example:

result := []string{}
if err := json.NewDecoder(response.Body).Decode(&result); err != nil {
    log.Fatalln(err)
}
So(len(result), ShouldEqual, 0)

Answer 2

Unmarshal the body into a struct and the use Gocheck's DeepEquals https://godoc.org/launchpad.net/gocheck