Join the 2022 Full-Stack Web Dev Bootcamp!
If you’re reading this post you’re probably searching on Google how to solve this problem: you’re passing a pointer to a slice or map in a function, and when referencing an item with *variable[0], you get that error.
How do I solve it?
The solution is simple: instead of using
*variable[0]use
(*variable)[0]Why am I getting this weird error? 🤔
*variable[0] is interpreted by the Go compiler as *(variable[0]). So what you’re telling the compiler to do is, get the first element in the slice, or the map item with key 0, and dereference that pointer.
This explains the error: variable in that context is a pointer, not a value, so you cannot get the [0] item of a pointer to an address, you need to dereference it first to get the value, which is what I think you are trying to do in the first place.
Want to become a better Web Developer? Join the 2022 Web Development Bootcamp!