essentials

There are some simple things that should be built-in to Go. As I find such things, I'll add them to this package. See the GoDoc for more. I will try to document some of the package's functionality here in the README, but not everything.

Slice deletion

Deleting elements from slices in Go is annoying and error prone. With essentials, the hard work is done for you:

mySlice := []int{1, 2, 3, 4}
essentials.OrderedDelete(&mySlice, 2)
fmt.Println(mySlice) // [1 2 4]

If you don't care about the order of your slice, then essentials.UnorderedDelete is faster and will also do the job.

The Die API

This API is useful for CLI apps where you want to exit with an error code in several places. Take this for example:

if dataFile == "" {
	fmt.Fprintln(os.Stderr, "Missing -data flag. See -help for more info.")
	os.Exit(1)
}

log.Println("Loading encoder...")
var enc tweetenc.Encoder
if err := serializer.LoadAny(encFile, &enc.Block); err != nil {
	fmt.Fprintln(os.Stderr, "Load encoder:", err)
	os.Exit(1)
}

dataReader, err := os.Open(dataFile)
if err != nil {
	fmt.Fprintln(os.Stderr, "Open data:", err)
	os.Exit(1)
}

In three different places, I print to standard error and then exit with a status code. It would be so much less typing to do this:

if dataFile == "" {
	essentials.Die("Missing -data flag. See -help for more info.")
}

log.Println("Loading encoder...")
var enc tweetenc.Encoder
if err := serializer.LoadAny(encFile, &enc.Block); err != nil {
	essentials.Die("Load encoder:", err)
}

dataReader, err := os.Open(dataFile)
if err != nil {
	essentials.Die("Open data:", err)
}