Golang : Clearing slice

Slice is something that I use frequently in Go and I always prefer slice to array at anytime. If you are new to Go and wonder what exactly slice is. See this article about the difference between array and slice. http://blog.golang.org/slices Basically.... Slice is a better version of Array.

There are times I need to recycle a slice or need to clear the slice and there are two methods to clear the slice.

 //first method :
 slice = nil

 // second method :
 slice = slice[0:0]

The codes below demonstrate how to clear a slice with the 2 methods.

clearslice.go

 package main

 import (
 "fmt"
 )

 func printslice(slice []string) {
 fmt.Println("slice = ", slice)
 for i := range slice {
 fmt.Println(i, slice[i])
 }
 }

 func main() {
 data := []string{"a", "b", "c", "d"}
 printslice(data)
 // clear the slice - the first way
 data = nil
 // see the slice content
 printslice(data)


 data2 := []string{"a", "b", "c", "d"}
 printslice(data2)
 // clear the slice - the second way
 data2 = data[0:0]
 // see the slice content
 printslice(data2)
 }

Output :

 slice =  [a b c d]
 0 a
 1 b
 2 c
 3 d
 slice =  []
 slice =  [a b c d]
 0 a
 1 b
 2 c
 3 d
 slice =  []