The Way to Go/

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Non-Exported Fields

Non-Exported Fields

This lesson covers the important concept of how to use fields of a struct if a struct is present in another file or in a separate custom package.

We'll cover the following...

Methods and non-exported fields

How can we change, or even read the name of the object of a user-defined type in another program? This is accomplished using a well-known technique from OO-languages: provide getter and setter methods. For the setter-method, we use the prefix Set, and for the getter-method, we only use the field name.

Look at the example below:

package main
import (
"fmt"
"person"
)

func main() {
    p := new(person.Person)
    // error: p.firstName undefined
    // (cannot refer to unexported field or method firstName)
    //p.firstName = "Eric"
    p.SetFirstName("Eric")
    fmt.Println(p.FirstName()) // Output: Eric
}

See the person.go file. We have a struct of type Person with two string fields firstName and lastName at line 3.

Look at ...