Handling Partial HTTP Responses with Go's net/http and Custom Error Types
I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. Quick question that's been bugging me - Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm experiencing unexpected behavior when my Go application receives partial HTTP responses from a third-party API... The API sometimes returns a 200 OK status with a response body that is incomplete due to network issues. I want to implement error handling that can detect this scenario and provide meaningful feedback. I've tried checking the content length but it doesn't seem to help as the content might be truncated without any explicit errors. Here’s a simplified version of my code: ```go package main import ( "bytes" "fmt" "io/ioutil" "net/http" ) // Custom error type for detecting partial responses type PartialResponseError struct { Body string } func (e *PartialResponseError) Error() string { return "Partial response received: " + e.Body } func fetchData(url string) (string, error) { resp, err := http.Get(url) if err != nil { return "", err } defer resp.Body.Close() // Reading the body body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body) if err != nil { return "", err } // Check if the response is partial by inspecting the body length if len(body) < 100 { // assuming 100 is the expected minimum length return "", &PartialResponseError{Body: string(body)} } return string(body), nil } func main() { data, err := fetchData("https://example.com/api/data") if err != nil { if partialErr, ok := err.(*PartialResponseError); ok { fmt.Println(partialErr.Error()) // handle partial response } else { fmt.Println("Error fetching data:", err) } return } fmt.Println("Data received:", data) } ``` In this code, I’m trying to determine if the response is too short to be considered valid, but that seems too simplistic. What are best practices for detecting partial responses in Go? Should I rely on specific HTTP headers or perhaps implement some retry logic? Any suggestions on how to improve this error handling would be greatly appreciated. I'm using Go version 1.20. For context: I'm using Go on Linux. Thanks in advance! This is part of a larger web app I'm building. What's the best practice here? I'm working on a API that needs to handle this. What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance!