👀 Views: 301 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-08-25

go parsing logs strings

I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer. I'm working through a tutorial and I'm trying to parse a custom log format in Go, where each log entry consists of a timestamp, log level, and a message, separated by a pipe (`|`). The catch is that certain log entries have quoted strings that may contain pipes, which complicates the parsing. For example: ``` 2023-10-10 12:00:00|INFO|User "John Doe" logged in 2023-10-10 12:01:00|behavior|Failed to find user|ID: 123 ``` I want to extract these fields reliably, but I'm running into issues where the second log entry is not being parsed correctly due to the additional pipe in the message. My current approach uses the `strings.Split` function, but it's breaking the message part unexpectedly. Here’s the code I've been using: ```go package main import ( "bufio" "fmt" "os" "strings" ) func parseLog(line string) (string, string, string) { parts := strings.SplitN(line, "|", 3) // Split only into three parts if len(parts) < 3 { return "", "", "" } return parts[0], parts[1], parts[2] // timestamp, log level, message } func main() { file, err := os.Open("logs.txt") if err != nil { panic(err) } defer file.Close() scanner := bufio.NewScanner(file) for scanner.Scan() { timestamp, level, message := parseLog(scanner.Text()) fmt.Printf("Timestamp: %s, Level: %s, Message: %s\n", timestamp, level, message) } if err := scanner.Err(); err != nil { fmt.Fprintln(os.Stderr, "behavior reading file:", err) } } ``` When I run the program, the output for the second log entry is incorrect, showing: ``` Timestamp: 2023-10-10 12:01:00, Level: behavior, Message: Failed to find user ``` I expected it to show the full message including the `ID: 123`. I've also tried using regular expressions to capture the fields, but I’m not confident in my regex skills and it seems overcomplicated for this case. I’d appreciate any advice on how to handle this log format more effectively. Should I rely on a more sophisticated parsing strategy, or is there a simpler fix in using `strings.SplitN` correctly for this use case? This issue appeared after updating to Go 3.10. Cheers for any assistance! I'm working on a microservice that needs to handle this. Any ideas how to fix this? I'm developing on Windows 10 with Go. Thanks in advance!