Go Strings

External

• https://golang.org/ref/spec#String_types
• https://go.dev/blog/strings

Internal

• Go Language
• Character Encoding
• Go Integers
• Python Strings

Overview

The main "use case" for strings is to hold characters made for printing, things you can see, and read. In Go, strings are read-only slices of bytes that represent Unicode code points. The language, and the standard library treat strings as containers of Unicode characters, encoded in the UTF-8 character encoding scheme. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding which uses one to four bytes per character. While other languages refer to the string's components as "characters", Go refers to the same components as "runes", instance of the rune type. They are 32-bit integers that represent Unicode code points. It is OK to refer to them as "characters".

Strings are immutable.

A string variable that is not explicitly initialized is implicitly initialized with the empty string.

String Variable Declaration

The pre-declared type identifier for strings is string.

var s string                // string type declaration without initialization
s = "example 1"             // initialization after declaration
var s2 string = "example 2" // variable initialization in declaration
var s3 = "example 3"        // variable initialization with type inference
s4 := "example 4"           // short variable declaration

String Literals

A string literal is a string constant produced by concatenating characters. Go has two kind of string literals: interpreted string literals and raw string literals.

Interpreted String Literals

An interpreted string literal is represented in Go code as a sequence of characters enclosed in double quotes. Each character is a byte, a rune, an UTF-8 code point. Interpreted strings allow escaping (\n or \t).

s := "something\nsomething else"
println(s)

Raw String Literals

Raw string literals are sequences of characters enclosed in backquotes (backticks) `. All characters between the pair of matching backticks is taken literally, back slashes have no special meaning and new lines can appear. Carriage return characters inside raw string literals are discarded.

s := `This
is an \n \t
example of 
raw string literal`

println(s)

will produce:

This
is an \n \t
example of 
raw string literal

Empty String

emptyString1 := ""
emptyString2 := ``

Operators

Indexing Operator []

The indexing operator [] returns a byte (uint8). It does NOT return a rune.

Strings are zero-based indexed. If the index is out of bounds, the runtime generates a run-time panic:

panic: runtime error: index out of range [6] with length 3

Concatenation Operator +

The concatenation operator + joins two strings together, producing a new immutable string instance. An attempt to use the concatenation operation between a string and an int, for example, won't work, because the int won't be automatically converted to string the way Java does.

s := "abc"
s2 := "xyz"
println(s + s2)

Equality Operator ==

String equality is tested with the == operator:

s := "blue"
s2 := "blue"
if s == s2 {
  println("strings are equal")
}

Reading Strings

String Length

The number of bytes used to store a string is obtained by invoking the built-in function len() on the string.

Note that len() does NOT necessarily return the number of characters (runes) in the string. If a Unicode character is represented on more than one byte, the len() result will be different from the number of characters in the string.

s := "A"
println(len(s)) // will display 1
s = "→"
println(len(s)) // will display 3, "→" requires 3 bytes to be encoded in UTF-8

The number of characters in a string is returned by utf8.RuneCountInString() function:

import "unicode/utf8"
// ...
s := "A"
println(utf8.RuneCountInString(s)) // will display 1
s = "→"
println(utf8.RuneCountInString(s)) // will display 1

The number of characters in a string can also be obtained by applying len() to the following type conversion:

s := "A"
println(len([]rune(s))) // will display 1
s = "→"
println(len([]rune(s))) // will display 1

Reading Characters from a String

"Characters" and "runes" are equivalent in this context. The characters are represented internally as rune instances. Note that the indexing operator applied directly to the string does not return characters (rune) but uint8

Read Individual Characters

Convert the string to a rune array and use the indexing operator applied to the rune array:

s := "A→B"
rs := []rune(s)
fmt.Printf("character 0: %c\n", rs[0]) // will display "A"
fmt.Printf("character 1: %c\n", rs[1]) // will display "→"
fmt.Printf("character 2: %c\n", rs[2]) // will display "B"

Also see Indexing Operator [] above.

Iterate over Characters

Use the range keyword to iterated over the string's characters:

s := "A→B"
for pos, c := range s {
  fmt.Printf("position: %d, character: %c, type: %s\n", pos, c, reflect.TypeOf(c))
}

will display:

position: 0, character: A, type: int32
position: 1, character: →, type: int32
position: 4, character: B, type: int32

Introspecting Characters

The unicode package provides a set of function to introspect characters for specific properties, such as whether they are a digit, a space, a letter, a punctuation character, whether they are lower case or user case, etc. For more details, see:

unicode | Introspecting Characters

String Manipulation and Processing in Go

The strings Package

String Comparison with Compare()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#Compare

Compare() is a string lexicographical comparison function in the strings package.

import "strings"

a := "ABC"
b := "XYZ"
println(strings.Compare(a, b))     // prints -1 for a < b
println(strings.Compare(a, b))     // prints 1 for a > b
println(strings.Compare(a, "ABC")) // prints 0 for a == b

Contains()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#Contains

A function of the strings package that returns true if substr is inside s:

import "strings"
strings.Contains(s, substr)

HasPrefix()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#HasPrefix

HasPrefix(s, prefix) is a function in the strings package that returns true is s starts with the prefix.

HasSuffix()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#HasSuffix

HasSuffix() is a function in the strings package.

Index()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#Index

Index(s, substr) is a function in the strings package that searches inside the string s for the substring substr and returns the index of the first occurrence of substr if it exists, or -1 otherwise.

Count()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#Count

Count() is a function in the strings package.

Join()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#Join

Join() is a function in the strings package.

Split()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#Split

Split() is a function in the strings package.

Replace()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#Replace

Replace(s, old, new, n) is a function in the strings package that replaces the first n instances of the old substring with the new substring. The string s is not modified, the function returns a new string instance.

ToLower()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#ToLower

ToLower(s) is a function in the strings package that changes the whole string to lower case. The original string s is not modified, a new string instance is created and returned.

ToUpper()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#ToUpper

ToUpper(s) is a function in the strings package that changes the whole string to upper case. The original string s is not modified, a new string instance is created and returned.

TrimSpace()

https://pkg.go.dev/strings#TrimSpace

TrimSpace(s) is a function in the strings package that returns a new string with all leading and trailing spaces removed.

TO DISTRIBUTE

Reading with a string with a Reader

TO PROCESS:

strings.NewReader()

See Go_Package_strings#NewReader.28.29

After Settling this Article, Process This

https://go.dev/blog/strings