Most idiomatic way to select elements from an array in Golang?

There is no one-liner as you have it in Ruby, but with a helper function you can make it almost as short.

Here's our helper function that loops over a slice, and selects and returns only the elements that meet a criteria captured by a function value:

func filter(ss []string, test func(string) bool) (ret []string) {
    for _, s := range ss {
        if test(s) {
            ret = append(ret, s)
        }
    }
    return
}

Using this helper function your task:

ss := []string{"foo_1", "asdf", "loooooooong", "nfoo_1", "foo_2"}

mytest := func(s string) bool { return !strings.HasPrefix(s, "foo_") && len(s) <= 7 }
s2 := filter(ss, mytest)

fmt.Println(s2)

Output (try it on the Go Playground):

[asdf nfoo_1]

Note:

If it is expected that many elements will be selected, it might be profitable to allocate a "big" ret slice beforehand, and use simple assignment instead of the append(). And before returning, slice the ret to have a length equal to the number of selected elements.

Note #2:

In my example I chose a test() function which tells if an element is to be returned. So I had to invert your "exclusion" condition. Obviously you may write the helper function to expect a tester function which tells what to exclude (and not what to include).

Have a look at robpike's filter library. This would allow you to do:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "strings"
    "filter"
)

func isNoFoo7(a string) bool {
    return ! strings.HasPrefix(a, "foo_") && len(a) <= 7
}

func main() {
    a := []string{"test", "some_other_test", "foo_etc"}
    result := Choose(a, isNoFoo7)
    fmt.Println(result) // [test]
}

Interestingly enough the README.md by Rob:

I wanted to see how hard it was to implement this sort of thing in Go, with as nice an API as I could manage. It wasn't hard. Having written it a couple of years ago, I haven't had occasion to use it once. Instead, I just use "for" loops. You shouldn't use it either.

So the most idiomatic way according to Rob would be something like:

func main() {
    a := []string{"test", "some_other_test", "foo_etc"}
    nofoos := []string{}
    for i := range a {
        if(!strings.HasPrefix(a[i], "foo_") && len(a[i]) <= 7) {
            nofoos = append(nofoos, a[i])
        }
    }
    fmt.Println(nofoos) // [test]
}

This style is very similar, if not identical, to the approach any C-family language takes.