Preserve structs data for using it later

I'm learning golang - coding small web blog, and writing router(I know there are available few - gorilla mux, martini, etc).

I have simple struct

type Routes struct {    
	method string
	pattern string
	handler Handler
}

and some regex matchers. But i can't understand how do i keep all routes that i will define in one place. Is using slice of structs good idea(like
[]Routes) to keep them all together?

P.S. This is meant for personal understanding of how it all works together

Your question is not really well defined. You told us you want to implement routing functionality based on regular expressions, but you haven't told us what kind of tasks you want to achieve which greatly influence the optimal or best data structure to be used.

You already mentioned you know about a lot of other implementations which are open source, maybe you should check their sources.

This answer might also be a help to you which shows a simple implementation of a basic implementation how to do routing functionality using regular expressions.

If you just want to be able to register regular expressions which if matched by the request path and then forward the serving to a Handler, yes, storing the "rules" in a []Routes is a viable and simple option.

Things to keep in mind:

• I would definitely compile the regexp in advance and store the result and not compile them each time which is an awful waste of resources. So your Routes struct should contain a field of type *regexp.Regexp instead of the pattern (you can keep the string pattern too e.g. for debugging purposes).

• If your Routes struct grows bigger, I would consider storing pointers in the slice and not struct values, e.g. []*Routes because each time when you loop over them (e.g. in each request to see which matches) or whenever you create a local variable from one of the Routes, a copy is made from the values. Copying large struct is inefficient compared to copying a pointer which is fast.