What ways does Go have to easily convert data into bytes or strings

Question

I've been developing a couple apps using Google App Engine Go SDK that use Memcache as a buffer for loading data from the Datastore. As the Memcache is only able to store data as []byte, I often find myself creating functions to encode the various structures as strings, and also functions to reverse the process. Needless to say, it is quite tedious when I need to do this sort of thing 5 times over.

Is there an easy way to convert any arbitrary structure that can be stored in Datastore into []byte in order to store it in Memcache and then load it back without having to create custom code for various structures in GAE Golang?

Answer 1

http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/gob or http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json can turn arbitrary datatypes into []byte slices given certain rules apply to the datastructures being encoded. You probably want one of them gob will encode to smaller sizes but json is more easily shareable with other languages if that is a requirement.