Golang : Meaning of omitempty in struct's field tag

Another quick note for myself and maybe useful for you as well. This is about the meaning of the word omitempty in a struct's field tag. Basically, it is used to tell the unmarshaller or marshaller to ignore empty fields.

For example, you created a program that will eat struct data and poop out JSON file. There are some struct data with empty field. Adding the word omitempty will instruct the the marshaller to skip the empty field and proceed to the next struct record data.

 type Employee struct {
 FirstName string `json:"first_name"`
 LastName string `json:"last_name"`
 Title string `json:"title,omitempty"`
 }

You might want to know about the meaning XML attributes - attr and how to use it at https://socketloop.com/tutorials/golang-adding-xml-attributes-to-xml-data-or-use-attribute-to-differentiate-a-common-tag-name

Reference :

http://golang.org/pkg/reflect/#StructTag