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diff --git a/vendor/github.com/mitchellh/mapstructure/README.md b/vendor/github.com/mitchellh/mapstructure/README.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0018dc7d9 --- /dev/null +++ b/vendor/github.com/mitchellh/mapstructure/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +# mapstructure [![Godoc](https://godoc.org/github.com/mitchellh/mapstructure?status.svg)](https://godoc.org/github.com/mitchellh/mapstructure) + +mapstructure is a Go library for decoding generic map values to structures +and vice versa, while providing helpful error handling. + +This library is most useful when decoding values from some data stream (JSON, +Gob, etc.) where you don't _quite_ know the structure of the underlying data +until you read a part of it. You can therefore read a `map[string]interface{}` +and use this library to decode it into the proper underlying native Go +structure. + +## Installation + +Standard `go get`: + +``` +$ go get github.com/mitchellh/mapstructure +``` + +## Usage & Example + +For usage and examples see the [Godoc](http://godoc.org/github.com/mitchellh/mapstructure). + +The `Decode` function has examples associated with it there. + +## But Why?! + +Go offers fantastic standard libraries for decoding formats such as JSON. +The standard method is to have a struct pre-created, and populate that struct +from the bytes of the encoded format. This is great, but the problem is if +you have configuration or an encoding that changes slightly depending on +specific fields. For example, consider this JSON: + +```json +{ + "type": "person", + "name": "Mitchell" +} +``` + +Perhaps we can't populate a specific structure without first reading +the "type" field from the JSON. We could always do two passes over the +decoding of the JSON (reading the "type" first, and the rest later). +However, it is much simpler to just decode this into a `map[string]interface{}` +structure, read the "type" key, then use something like this library +to decode it into the proper structure. |