Dereferencing Pointers

Part of the Fundamentals section of Coddy's GO journey — lesson 63 of 109.

Dereferencing pointers (*) lets you access the value stored at a memory address. This is called "dereferencing" the pointer.

Create a variable and a pointer to it:

func main() {
    number := 42
    pointer := &number
    
    // Dereference the pointer to get the value
    value := *pointer
    
    fmt.Println("Pointer:", pointer)
    fmt.Println("Dereferenced value:", value)
}

The output shows both the pointer and the value it points to:

Pointer: 0xc000018030
Dereferenced value: 42

The asterisk (*) before a pointer variable accesses the actual value at that memory address.

Challenge

Beginner

In this challenge, you'll practice dereferencing pointers in Go. We have a variable message with a string value, and a pointer messagePtr that points to it.

Your task is to dereference the pointer to access and print the value it points to.

Try it yourself

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	// Here's our string variable
	message := "Hello, pointers!"
	
	// This is a pointer to our message variable
	messagePtr := &message
	
	// TODO: Dereference the messagePtr to get the value it points to
	// and store it in the variable 'value'
	value := ""
	
	// Print the results
	fmt.Println("The pointer points to the value:", value)
}