net/http: documentation of "func (*Client) Do" doesn't state clearly when to close response.Body

[gopherbot]

by fish@freigeist.org:

The documentation for Do()[1] says:

"When err is nil, resp always contains a non-nil resp.Body."

But it doesn't specify the behaviour if error is non-nil:
Do I need to close the Body if err is NOT nil?






---
[1] https://godoc.org/net/http#Client.Do

[ianlancetaylor]

Comment 1:

Labels changed: added repo-main, release-none, documentation.

[gopherbot]

Comment 2 by fish@freigeist.org:

FYI: https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/7864/files#r17063341 It seems like there is a
codepath that will return an error and a resp which should be closed.

[davecheney]

Comment 3:

@fish
"But it doesn't specify the behaviour if error is non-nil:
Do I need to close the Body if err is NOT nil?"
No, you do not need to close Body, in fact you should not expect Body to be in any known
state if an error is returned.

[gopherbot]

Comment 4 by fish@freigeist.org:

It seems you need to close body if checkredirect returns an error:
https://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse/src/pkg/net/http/client.go?name=go1.3.1#376

[odeke-em]

Echoing @davecheney's comment on when a non-nil error is returned: Would it be reasonable to encourage first checking if res.Close is set and if res.Body is non-nil? Like this

if err != nil {
     // handle error here
     return
}
...
if res.Close && res.Body != nil {
     if err := res.Body.Close(); err != nil {
         // deal with this error here
     }
}