Developing a TCP client

This section is about developing TCP clients. The two subsections that follow present two equivalent ways of developing TCP clients.

Developing a TCP client with net.Dial()

First, we are going to present the most widely used way, which is implemented in tcpC.go:

package main
import (
    "bufio"
    "fmt"
    "net"
    "os"
    "strings"
)

The import block contains packages such as bufio and fmt that also work with file I/O operations.

func main() {
    arguments := os.Args
    if len(arguments) == 1 {
        fmt.Println("Please provide host:port.")
        return
    }

First, we read the details of the TCP server we want to connect to.

    connect := arguments[1]
    c, err := net.Dial("tcp", connect)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
        os.Exit(5)
    }

With the connection details, we call net.Dial()—its first parameter is the protocol...