[http] Go doing a GET request and building the Querystring

As a commenter mentioned you can get Values from net/url which has an Encode method. You could do something like this (req.URL.Query() returns the existing url.Values)

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "net/http"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    req, err := http.NewRequest("GET", "http://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/popular", nil)
    if err != nil {
        log.Print(err)
        os.Exit(1)
    }

    q := req.URL.Query()
    q.Add("api_key", "key_from_environment_or_flag")
    q.Add("another_thing", "foo & bar")
    req.URL.RawQuery = q.Encode()

    fmt.Println(req.URL.String())
    // Output:
    // http://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/popular?another_thing=foo+%26+bar&api_key=key_from_environment_or_flag
}

http://play.golang.org/p/L5XCrw9VIG