[Golang] Embed File in String Literal

Embed any type of file, no matter it is data/assets/resources/binary/etc., in string literal in Go code.

When I tried googling to find the way to embed files directly in Go code, I found that if we combine the string literal with encoding/hex package in Go standard library, we can embed any type of file in Go code.

The first step is to convert the byte sequences of a file to hex value:

import (
      "encoding/hex"
      "io/ioutil"
)

func FileToStringLiteral(filepath string) (sl string, err error) {
      bs, err := ioutil.ReadFile(filepath)
      if err != nil {
              return
      }
      sl = hex.EncodeToString(bs)
      return
}

I create a file, the content of which is hello world\n, the hex value returned by above method is 68656c6c6f20776f726c640a. Now we embed the file content in string literal as follows:

import (
      "encoding/hex"
)

const myFile = "68656c6c6f20776f726c640a"

func ReadMyFile() ([]byte, error) {
      return hex.DecodeString(myFile)
}

We can access the content of the file as follows:

b, err := ReadMyFile()
if err != nil {
      panic(err)
}

print(string(b))

The printed output will be hello world\n.

Tested on: Ubuntu Linux 17.04, Go 1.8.1.

References: