Read contents of tar file without unzipping to disk

Question

I have been able to loop through the files in a tar file, but I am stuck on how to read the contents of those files as string. I would like to know how to print the contents

Answer 1

Just use the tar.Reader as an io.Reader for each file you want to read.

tr := tar.NewReader(r)

// get the next file entry 
h, _ := tr.Next() 

If you need the whole file as a string:

// read the complete content of the file h.Name into the bs []byte
bs, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(tr)

// convert the []byte to a string
s := string(bs)

If you need to read line by line, then this would be better:

// create a Scanner for reading line by line
s := bufio.NewScanner(tr)

// line reading loop
for s.Scan() {

  // read the current last read line of text
  l := s.Text()

  // ...and do something with l

}

// you should check for error at this point
if s.Err() != nil {
  // handle it
}