TIL: Use strings.Fields() to split strings on whitespace in Go

I’ve been working on an introductory Go project that involves processing logs from my Pihole. The log has lines that look like this:

Sep  8 00:01:27 dnsmasq[8211]: cached github.com is 140.82.112.3

To parse these lines, I need to split them on whitespace. Initially I used this method invocation:

tokens := strings.Split(line, " ")

This gave me problems. The split would return a slice with elements of the log line and different indicies depending on the timestamp. If the entry occured on a single-digit day of the month, there would be an extra element in the slice compared to double-digit days of the month.

In Go, to split a string with each token separated by consecutive whitespace characters, instead use this function from the strings module:

tokens := strings.Fields(line)

Tags: til golang