5.5 Function Values
Functions are first-class values in Go: like other values, function values have types, and they may be assigned to variables or passed to or returned from functions. A function value may be called like any other function. For example:
func square(n int) int { return n * n }
func negative(n int) int { return -n }
func product(m, n int) int { return m * n }
f := square
fmt.Println(f(3)) // "9"
f = negative
fmt.Println(f(3)) // "-3"
fmt.Printf("%T
", f) // "func(int) int"
f = product // compile error: can't assign f(int, int) int to f(int) int
The zero value of a function type is nil. Calling a nil
function value causes a panic:
var f func(int) int f(3) // panic: call of nil function
Function values may be compared with nil:
var f func(int) int
if f != nil {
f(3)
}
but they are not comparable, so they may not be compared against each other or used as keys in a map.
Function values let us parameterize our
functions over not just data, but behavior too. The standard
libraries contain many examples.
For instance, strings.Map applies a function to
each character of a string, joining the results to make another
string.
func add1(r rune) rune { return r + 1 }
fmt.Println(strings.Map(add1, "HAL-9000")) // "IBM.:111"
fmt.Println(strings.Map(add1, "VMS")) // "WNT"
fmt.Println(strings.Map(add1, "Admix")) // "Benjy"
The findLinks function from Section 5.2 uses a
helper function, visit, to visit all the nodes in an HTML
document and apply an action to each one.
Using a function value, we can separate the logic for tree
traversal from the logic for the action to be applied to each node,
letting us reuse the traversal with different actions.
// forEachNode calls the functions pre(x) and post(x) for each node
// x in the tree rooted at n. Both functions are optional.
// pre is called before the children are visited (preorder) and
// post is called after (postorder).
func forEachNode(n *html.Node, pre, post func(n *html.Node)) {
if pre != nil {
pre(n)
}
for c := n.FirstChild; c != nil; c = c.NextSibling {
forEachNode(c, pre, post)
}
if post != nil {
post(n)
}
}
The forEachNode function accepts two function
arguments, one to call before a node’s children are visited and one
to call after. This arrangement gives the caller a great deal
of flexibility.
For example, the functions startElement and endElement
print the start and end tags of an HTML element like
<b>...</b>:
var depth int
func startElement(n *html.Node) {
if n.Type == html.ElementNode {
fmt.Printf("%*s<%s>
", depth*2, "", n.Data)
depth++
}
}
func endElement(n *html.Node) {
if n.Type == html.ElementNode {
depth--
fmt.Printf("%*s</%s>
", depth*2, "", n.Data)
}
}
The functions also indent the output using another fmt.Printf trick.
The * adverb in %*s prints a string
padded with a variable number of spaces.
The width and the string are provided by the arguments depth*2
and "".
If we call forEachNode on an HTML document, like this:
forEachNode(doc, startElement, endElement)
we get a more elaborate variation on the output of our earlier
outline program:
$ go build gopl.io/ch5/outline2
$ ./outline2 http://gopl.io
<html>
<head>
<meta>
</meta>
<title>
</title>
<style>
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<a>
<img>
</img>
...
Exercise 5.7:
Develop startElement and endElement into a general HTML pretty-printer.
Print comment nodes, text nodes, and the attributes of each element
(<a href='...'>). Use short forms like <img/>
instead of <img></img> when an element has no children.
Write a test to ensure that the output can be parsed successfully.
(See Chapter 11.)
Exercise 5.8:
Modify forEachNode so that the pre and post
functions return a boolean result indicating whether to continue the
traversal.
Use it to write a function ElementByID with the following signature
that finds the first HTML element with the specified id attribute.
The function should stop the traversal as soon as a match is found.
func ElementByID(doc *html.Node, id string) *html.Node
Exercise 5.9:
Write a function expand(s string, f func(string) string) string that
replaces each substring “$foo” within s by the text returned
by f("foo").