No matter how you like to participate in developer communities, Pulumi wants to meet you there. If you want to meet other Pulumi users to share use-cases and best practices, contribute code or documentation, see us at an event, or just tell a story about something cool you did with Pulumi, you are part of our community.

Pulumi Community

I have what is probably a general Golang question (I'm a newbie). If I have a variable that defined as `interface{}`, how would I convert the value of that variable to a string?

If you’re sure the variable actually holds a string, you can cast it using `foo.(string)` <https://play.golang.org/p/Cp3EAcdUeRn>

If you want to test whether it’s  string you can test it during assignment <https://play.golang.org/p/chpYZVgNBKH>

I'm sure it does contain a string, but `foo.(string)` (type assertion, I believe that's called?) doesn't work. Go gives a "panic: interface conversion" error.

yes type assertion is the correct Go term

Being more precise, the variable is actually defined as `[]interface{}`, but using `([]string)` doesn't work either.

ah you cannot, unfortunately, convert slices of interface{} to slices of another type in one step; you have to loop over each item in the slice and build a new slice of the type you want

Using a `range` statement to loop over it and convert each element?

However, if that variable is a field in a struct, then you can't use `range` on it, yes?

you can use range over any slice, wherever it is

You might also like the Gopher’s slack space <https://invite.slack.golangbridge.org/>

there’s ~50k people on that, and a #newbies channel as well