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ViewsDebug Inspector showing strange characters?
I'm just getting into Go for the first time and finally got things running on my Win10 machine. Finally got breakpoints working inside of IntelliJ IDEA, and I'm seeing stuff like this in my debugger window. Those messes of unicode chars should actually be a 24-char HEX id that's coming from MongoDB.
My best guess is that this is a problem with mgo not properly unmarshalling ObjectId objects, but this doesn't seem to be a problem for any of the devs running linux or macOS, so maybe it's just a Windows thing?
Any input would be appreciated!
1 answers
Answer question0
No error here. bson.ObjectId has an underlying type of string:
type ObjectId string
But it is used to store 12 "arbitrary" bytes ("arbitrary" means it is not meant to be interpreted by runes, and it's not a valid UTF-8 encoded sequence). It is usually displayed using the hex representation of its bytes, for humans.
Debuggers don't take that convenience. They see it's a string, so they attempt to display it as a string (even though it's not meant to). This is not a Windows-only thing, the Atom editor with the delve debugger does the same on Linux too. Nothing to worry about.
If you print an ObjectId, it's usually the fmt package's "thing" to use its String() method to acquire the string value to be displayed. Debuggers do not necessarily do that.