How to call the Scan variadic function using reflection

Here’s the solution that I’ve arrived at. It doesn’t get the Types before traversing the data, and so doesn’t know before hand the type of each value before pulling the values out through Scan(), but the point really is to not have to know the types before hand.

The trick was to create 2 slices, one for the values, and one that holds pointers in parallel to the values slice. Then once the pointers are used to fill data, the values array is actually filled with the data, which can then be used to populate other data structures.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    _ "github.com/lib/pq"
    "database/sql"
)

func main() {
    db, _ := sql.Open(
        "postgres",
        "user=postgres dbname=go_testing password=pass sslmode=disable")

    rows, _ := db.Query("SELECT * FROM _user;")

    columns, _ := rows.Columns()
    count := len(columns)
    values := make([]interface{}, count)
    valuePtrs := make([]interface{}, count)

    for rows.Next() {
        for i := range columns {
            valuePtrs[i] = &values[i]
        }

        rows.Scan(valuePtrs...)

        for i, col := range columns {
            val := values[i]

            b, ok := val.([]byte)
            var v interface{}
            if (ok) {
                v = string(b)
            } else {
                v = val
            }

            fmt.Println(col, v)
        }
    }
}