encoding/json: incorrect handling of tagged anonymous fields

[mxk]

go1.4.2 windows/amd64

https://play.golang.org/p/YGsBuS5Acz

The json package documentation says "an anonymous struct field with a name given in its JSON tag is treated as having that name, rather than being anonymous." I expected the same encoding of both structs in the example above. The same problem exists when unmarshaling values, which is how I bumped into this in the first place.

[nodirt]

This happens because time.Time implements json.Marshaler: https://godoc.org/time#Time.MarshalJSON

As a result, S1 "inherits" JSON marshalling of the embedded time.Time.

I assume you embed time.Time because you want to have all its methods in S1. An alternative to making time.Time a named field is to override MarshalJSON and UnmarshalJSON in S1:

func (s S1) MarshalJSON() ([]byte, error) {
  return json.Marshal(S2{s.Time, s.Value})
}

func (s S1) UnmarshalJSON(data []byte) error {
  var s2 S2
  err := json.Unmarshal(data, &s2)
  s.Time = s2.Time
  s.Value = s2.Value
  return err
}

It works https://play.golang.org/p/FGjjXIdOWY

[minux]

Working as intended.