Error "value of type []uint8 is not assignable to type []string" when scanning a DB row

I am using postgresql as my backend database.

Tried to scan a field languagespoken which is an array of text

var user userprofile
row := core.db.QueryRow(
    "SELECT languagespoken FROM \"user\" WHERE id = $1",
    userId,
)

err := row.Scan(&user.Languages)

if err != nil {
	return user, err
}

My structure looks like this

type userprofile struct {
    Languages []string `json:languages`
}

But getting the error

2014/06/30 15:27:17 PANIC: reflect.Set: **value of type []uint8 is not assignable to type []string**
/usr/lib/go/src/pkg/reflect/value.go:2198 (0x56c152)
	Value.assignTo: panic(context + ": value of type " + v.typ.String() + " is not assignable to type " + dst.String())
/usr/lib/go/src/pkg/reflect/value.go:1385 (0x56966b)
	Value.Set: x = x.assignTo("reflect.Set", v.typ, target)
/usr/lib/go/src/pkg/database/sql/convert.go:215 (0x492d70)
	convertAssign: dv.Set(sv)
/usr/lib/go/src/pkg/database/sql/sql.go:1562 (0x49c0e5)
	(*Rows).Scan: err := convertAssign(dest[i], sv)
/usr/lib/go/src/pkg/database/sql/sql.go:1630 (0x49c560)
	(*Row).Scan: err := r.rows.Scan(dest...)
/home/ceresti/source/gocode/src/ceresti.kilnhg.com/ceresti/server/app/databaseapi.go:144 (0x402478)
	(*coreStruct).GetUserProfile: err := row.Scan(&user.Languages)
/home/ceresti/source/gocode/src/ceresti.kilnhg.com/ceresti/server/app/restfulapi.go:327 (0x40a63c)
	Getuserprofile: userprofileStruct, err := core.GetUserProfile(userId)
/usr/lib/go/src/pkg/runtime/asm_amd64.s:340 (0x4309c2)

Please let me know how to resolve this issue.

Not all sql databases specify array types (e.g., sqlite3). Go doesn't support any sql implementations directly, but it supplies an implementation-agnostic interface (in the generic sense of the word) for which third-party drivers may be written. Go doesn't impose any limitations on which types its drivers may support, so if a type doesn't cooperate, it's probably the fault of the driver.

TL;DR: Try getting it as a string

// if `string` doesn't work, try `[]uint8` or `[]byte` and then convert
// that output to a string if necessary
var languages string
if err := row.Scan(&languages); err != nil {
    // handle error
}

// depending on how the string is encoded, this may or may not work
// Update: since you say your list is encoded in the form:
// `{elem1, elem2, elem3}`, we'll simply ignore the first and last
// characters and split on ", "
user.Languages = strings.Split(languages[1:len(languages)-1], ", ")

It appears you're trying to scan the entire result set of that database query in one shot. You can't do that; you need to read each row, one at a time, into a byte slice, then convert the byte slice into a string.

Since you're serializing into a []string, saving the byte slice each time is not a priority. In this case, you can use sql.RawBytes instead of []byte, which will reuse the same memory.

// error checking elided
var row sql.RawBytes
myRow.Scan(&row) // note the pointer!
str := string(row)