io

I/O
import "io"

Provides basic interfaces for I/O primitives. The Reader and Writer interfaces are fundamental to Go's I/O model.

Example

package main

import (
    "io"
    "os"
    "strings"
)

func main() {
    r := strings.NewReader("Hello")
    io.Copy(os.Stdout, r)
}

Key Types & Functions

ReaderWriterReadCloserCopyReadAllNopCloser

About io

The io package (imported as io) belongs to the I/O category of Go packages. Provides basic interfaces for I/O primitives. The Reader and Writer interfaces are fundamental to Go's I/O model.

Go's standard library is one of the language's greatest strengths, providing production-ready implementations for networking, cryptography, encoding, I/O, and more. The io package follows Go's philosophy of simplicity and composability — small, focused packages that combine through interfaces like io.Reader and io.Writer.

When using io in production, follow Go best practices: handle errors explicitly, use context for cancellation and timeouts, prefer composition over inheritance, and write table-driven tests. The Go documentation at pkg.go.dev provides comprehensive API references and examples for every exported type and function.

Related Packages

bufioosbytesstrings