What is the Sscan function in golang?

The Sscan function in the Go programming language is used to read data from a source string of your choosing, format the string, and store the resultant space-separated values into the destinations specified by the additional arguments.

To use this function, you must import the fmt package in your file and access the Sscan function within, using the . notation: fmt.Sscan. Here, Sscan is the actual function, while fmt is the Go package that stores the definition of this function.

Function definition

The definition of the Sscan function inside the fmt package is as follows:

Parameters

fmt.Sscan takes a reading source along with a list of a variable number of arguments.

src: The source from where the input is to be taken. This should be an object of type string.
a ...interface{}: The list of all arguments that you want to store data in. After taking in the input, the input string is automatically split on space characters. The components are stored sequentially into the given arguments. If there are fewer arguments than the different splits of the input string, then the extra pieces are discarded.

Return values

The fmt.Sscan function can return two things:

count: The number of arguments the function writes to.
err: Any error thrown during the execution of the function.

Examples

The following example is a simple program where we read data from the variable message of type string, store the space-separated parts into our desired variables, and then use the normal Print function to print a new string, using these variables, to the standard output.

Sscan reads from the input source sequentially. Hence, we must give the list of arguments in the order specified in the format string.

Here, we require an input with the specific format matching the sequence of arguments we have given the Sscan function.

For example, with the first word being a string, the second can be anything since it is stored in temp and is unused. The third can be an int, and another string after that.

Here, we are using: “Faraz owns 500 acres of land”. We then use the Sscan function to read this input and store parts of the string corresponding to the amount of land, units of measurement, and the owner’s name. We then used Printf to print a new string:

package main
 
import (
    "fmt"
)
 
func main() {
 
  //assigning our buffer a message
  message := "Faraz owns 500 acres of land"
  var name string
  var unit string
  var amount int
  var temp string
  // taking input and storing in variable using the buffer string
 	arg_count, error :=   fmt.Sscan(message, &name, &temp, &amount, &unit)
  // print out new string using the extracted values 
  fmt.Printf ("%d %s of land is owned by %s\n",amount, unit, name);
	if error == nil  {
		fmt.Print("Sscan executed without errors and wrote ",arg_count, " arguments")
	}
 
}

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