How does Go handle data serialization and deserialization?

In Go, data serialization and deserialization can be achieved using the encoding/json package, which provides functionality for converting Go data structures to JSON and vice versa. The package also supports other data formats such as XML and Protocol Buffers.

To serialize a Go data structure to JSON, you can use the json.Marshal() function, which takes the data structure as an input and returns a byte slice containing the JSON representation of the data. For example:

import (
    "encoding/json"
    "fmt"
)

type Person struct {
    Name string `json:"name"`
    Age  int    `json:"age"`
}

func main() {
    person := Person{Name: "John Doe", Age: 30}
    jsonBytes, err := json.Marshal(person)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
    }
    jsonString := string(jsonBytes)
    fmt.Println(jsonString)
}

This will output:

{"name":"John Doe","age":30}

To deserialize a JSON string to a Go data structure, you can use the json.Unmarshal() function, which takes the JSON byte slice as input and a pointer to the target data structure. For example:

func main() {
    jsonString := `{"name":"John Doe","age":30}`
    var person Person
    err := json.Unmarshal([]byte(jsonString), &person)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
    }
    fmt.Println(person.Name)
    fmt.Println(person.Age)
}

This will output:

John Doe
30

In addition to the encoding/json package, Go also has support for other data serialization formats such as encoding/xml and the popular Protocol Buffers through the use of third-party libraries.