Part 2: Write a program to take user input

In this part, first, we are going to write a program that takes user input and prints it.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  var first_name string
  fmt.Println("Please enter your first name:")
  fmt.Scanln(&first_name)
  fmt.Printf("Your name is %s", first_name)
  // or
  // fmt.Println("Your name is ", first_name)
}

var first_name string

• var keyword is used to declare a variable. It is followed by the name of the variable, which is first_name in this case and then we have to specify the data type, that is string here.

• Variables can also be declared with initialization.

  var first_name string = "akhil"
  
  // multiple same data-type variables can be declared as follows:
  var maths_score, physics_score
  
  // they can be initialized too:
  var maths_score, physics_score int = 89, 95
  

• Variables can also be declared without var and data-type when declared inside a function using := construct.

  first_name := "akhil"
  bats_count := 3
  

• All the different data types available in Go can be found here: tour.golang.org/basics/11.

fmt.Scanln(&first_name)

• Scanln present in fmt is used to read from standard input. It stops reading whenever it finds a newline. Scanln takes the reference to the variable where it needs to store the value it reads. We will expand more on &variable syntax when we reach pointers. For now, just note that we need to provide &variable to Scanln in order to store the input in the variable.

fmt.Printf("Your name is %s", first_name)

• Printf is used to print to standard output according to the format specifier used. Think of format specifier as a bucket that can only hold a specific type of data. So for holding string data, we have used %s. Read more about fmt.Printf here...

In the next part, we will see conditionals. Thanks for reading this.