Go Programming

Go Maps Introduction for Beginners
By Basant Singh | Leave a Comment

Maps are unordered collection of key value pairs. In other languages they are known with various names viz. hash tables, dictionaries and associative arrays. Here’s an example of a Key-Value pair – Working Days of the week denoted by integer keys.

Key Value
1 Monday
2 Tuesday
3 Wednesday
4 Thursday
5 Friday

In the above table Key = 1 denotes a value of Monday. Key = 3 denotes a value of Wednesday.

Let us see how we can represent the above using Go Maps:

Code-Snippet# 1

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {   
 
   // Map declaration
   day := make(map[int]string)

   //Assigning values    
   day[1] = "Monday"    
   day[2] = "Tuesday"   
   day[3] = "Wednesday"
   day[4] = "Thursday"   
   day[5] = "Friday"   

   //Fetching values
   fmt.Println(day[1])
   fmt.Println(day[3])
}

Output

Monday
Wednesday

Play with the above code

Code Explanation

How to Declare a Map?

day := make(map[int]string)

You can read this as the variable day is a map of int keys to string values.

Here we’ve used builtin make function with Key type as int and value type as string as shown above. Assigning and fetching values are similar to simple Arrays.

Important Note: Maps are reference types. So, the value of the variable day above is nil. It doesn’t point to an initialized map.

The above Code-Snippet# 1 can be made shorter and precise as follows:

Code-Snippet# 2

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {   
 
    // Map declaration
    day := map[int]string {

    //Assigning values    
    1 : "Monday",
    2 : "Tuesday",   
    3 : "Wednesday",
    4 : "Thursday", 
    5 : "Friday",
   }
   //Fetching values
   fmt.Println(day[1])
   fmt.Println(day[3])
}

The output of the Code-Snippet# 2  (shared above) is exactly same as what we have seen for Code-Snippet# 1.

Let us see some more interesting operations with Golang Maps. Read the comments to easily understand the code.

Code-Snippet# 3

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {   
 
    // Map declaration
    day := map[int]string {

    //Assigning values    
    1 : "Monday",
    2 : "Tuesday",   
    3 : "Wednesday",
    4 : "Thursday", 
    5 : "Friday",
   }
   //Fetching the Map - all key-value pairs
   fmt.Println("Map: ", day)

   //Total number of key-values in the Map
   fmt.Println("Length of the map: ", len(day))
   
   //Check if Key=6 exists in the Map
   _, isPresent := day[6]
   fmt.Println("Does Key 6 Exist: ", isPresent)

   //Deleting Key=3
   delete(day,3)
   fmt.Println("Map: ", day)
   fmt.Println("Length of the map: ", len(day))

   //Check if Key=3 exists in the Map
  _, exist := day[3]
   fmt.Println("Does Key 3 Exist: ", exist)  
}

Play with the above code here

Output

Map:  map[1:Monday 2:Tuesday 3:Wednesday 4:Thursday 5:Friday]
Length of the map:  5
Does Key 6 Exist:  false
Map:  map[5:Friday 1:Monday 2:Tuesday 4:Thursday]
Length of the map:  4
Does Key 3 Exist:  false

You can find a few more beginner level code examples of Go Maps here. Please comment with your feedback.

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    Basant Singh

    Basant is a talented software developer who is very engaged in web & cloud platforms on a daily basis. He is a contributor to codingthis.com reporting on various news and troubleshooting on various platforms. Basant is very strong in SQL and a great asset to the CodingThis community.

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