Go – Reading a file line by line in Go

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I'm unable to find file.ReadLine function in Go. I can figure out how to quickly write one, but I am just wondering if I'm overlooking something here. How does one read a file line by line?

Best Answer

In Go 1.1 and newer the most simple way to do this is with a bufio.Scanner. Here is a simple example that reads lines from a file:

package main

import (
    "bufio"
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    file, err := os.Open("/path/to/file.txt")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer file.Close()

    scanner := bufio.NewScanner(file)
    // optionally, resize scanner's capacity for lines over 64K, see next example
    for scanner.Scan() {
        fmt.Println(scanner.Text())
    }

    if err := scanner.Err(); err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
}

This is the cleanest way to read from a Reader line by line.

There is one caveat: Scanner will error with lines longer than 65536 characters. If you know your line length is greater than 64K, use the Buffer() method to increase the scanner's capacity:

...
scanner := bufio.NewScanner(file)

const maxCapacity = longLineLen  // your required line length
buf := make([]byte, maxCapacity)
scanner.Buffer(buf, maxCapacity)

for scanner.Scan() {
...
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