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

I am pretty new to Go and don't quite understand everything as yet. In many of the modern languages Node.js, Angular, jQuery, PHP you can do a GET request with additional query string parameters.

Doing this in Go isn't quite a simple as it seems, and I can't really figure it out as yet. I really don't want to have to concatenate a string for each of the requests I want to do.

Here is the sample script:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "io/ioutil"
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    client := &http.Client{}

    req, _ := http.NewRequest("GET", "http://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/popular", nil)
    req.Header.Add("Accept", "application/json")
    resp, err := client.Do(req)

    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println("Errored when sending request to the server")
        return
    }

    defer resp.Body.Close()
    resp_body, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)

    fmt.Println(resp.Status)
    fmt.Println(string(resp_body))
}

In this example you can see there is a URL, which requires a GET variable of api_key with your api key as the value. The problem being that this becomes hard coded in the form of:

req, _ := http.NewRequest("GET", "http://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/popular?api_key=mySuperAwesomeApiKey", nil)

Is there a way to build this query string dynamically?? At the moment I will need to assemble the URL prior to this step in order to get a valid response.

Using NewRequest just to create an URL is an overkill. Use the net/url package:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "net/url"
)

func main() {
    base, err := url.Parse("http://www.example.com")
    if err != nil {
        return
    }

    // Path params
    base.Path += "this will get automatically encoded"

    // Query params
    params := url.Values{}
    params.Add("q", "this will get encoded as well")
    base.RawQuery = params.Encode() 

    fmt.Printf("Encoded URL is %q\n", base.String())
}

Playground: https://play.golang.org/p/YCTvdluws-r

Use r.URL.Query() when you appending to existing query, if you are building new set of params use the url.Values struct like so

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "log"
    "net/http"
    "net/url"
    "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)
    }

    // if you appending to existing query this works fine 
    q := req.URL.Query()
    q.Add("api_key", "key_from_environment_or_flag")
    q.Add("another_thing", "foo & bar")

    // or you can create new url.Values struct and encode that like so
    q := url.Values{}
    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/popularanother_thing=foo+%26+bar&api_key=key_from_environment_or_flag
}

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