Question

This program returns:

package main

import (
    "flag"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    num_agents := flag.Int("a", 10, "number of agents")
    flag.Parse();

    fmt.Printf("%#v",num_agents)
}

Outputs

(*int)(0x18600110)`

However that is not what I want… What I want is the integer.

So according to the documentation seems I should use flag.IntVar(&pointer_to_variable_integer)

package main

import (
    "flag"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    var num_agents int
    flag.IntVar(&num_agents,"a", 10, "number of agents")
    flag.Parse();

    fmt.Printf("%#v",num_agents)
}

However that doesn’t seem right… Because I need to write 2 lines of code when 1 should do.
somehow it seems to me that

num_agents := flags.Int("a", 10, "number of agents") 

Should return an int instead of *int.?
Or maybe there is an easy way to cast from *int to int ??

Answer 1

Simply dereference the pointer:

num_agents := flags.Int("a", 10, "number of agents")
fmt.Println(*num_agents)