Settings global conditional variables in Go - variables

Question

I want to parse and set a variable conditionally in Go at the global package level based on the value of of an ENV var, so that I don't have to check for it every time in a utility function (as the variable would be declared once at run time). For example, what I want to accomplish is (Go pseudo-code):
import (
"fmt"
"os"
"strconv"
)
// This works to read the value of MYVAR (=true/false)
var myvar string = os.Getenv("MYVAR")
// Apparently this is too much for Go
var myvarbool, _ = strconv.ParseBool(myvar)
// Utility function to check for value
func mycheck() {
if myvarbool {
fmt.Print("MYVAR is true")
}
}
This is a library package, so doesn't have a main() function to do this kind of setup, but I want to be able to use mycheck() in other functions in the library, and don't want to have to read and parse MYVAR every time mycheck() is called.

Answer 1

One way to accomplish what you're looking to do would be to process the environment variable in an init() function, so something like the following would work:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"os"
"strconv"
)
var (
myvar string = os.Getenv("MYVAR")
myvarbool bool
)
func init() {
myvarbool, _ = strconv.ParseBool(myvar)
}
// Utility function to check for value
func mycheck() {
if myvarbool {
fmt.Print("MYVAR is true")
}
}
Playground

Answer 2

I'm not sure what problem you had, your code from the OP is valid, also you can have it in one line like:
var myvarbool, _ = strconv.ParseBool(os.Getenv("MYVAR"))
playground

Answer 3

After actually thinking about this for a couple of minutes, I've realised I can just create a wrapper function to do the work, and call that instead (again, largely pseudo-code without extra checks):
var myenvbool bool = myenv("MYVAR")
func myenv(envvar string) bool {
myenvvalue := os.Getenv(envvar)
myenvbool, _ := strconv.ParseBool(myenvvalue)
return myenvbool
}
func checkenv() {
if myenvbool {
fmt.Print("myenvbool is true")
}
}