Background 🧐
Go includes strings as a builtin type. The zero value for a string is the empty string. Go supports Unicode; Strings in Go are immutable; you can reassign the value of a string variable, but you cannot change the value of the string that is assigned to it. As i have observed most of its characteristics are inherited from C.
Multiline strings in Go
If you are like me, you will want to know how to create multi-line strings pretty quickly for one reason or another 😁
str := `This is a
multiline
string introduction for go strings.`
Concatenate Strings in Go
While you can concatenate strings with the + operator, and this works file
str := "vivek"
str = str + "sheshadri"
it is more efficient to use something like a bytes.Buffer or a strings.Builder rather than the above use case and this is more efficient if you are combining Lots of strings
var sb strings.Builder
sb.WriteString("vivek")
sb.WriteString("sheshadri")
complete code
package main
import (
"fmt"
"strings"
)
func main() {
var sb strings.Builder
sb.WriteString("vivek")
sb.WriteString("sheshadri")
fmt.Println(sb.String())
}
Outputs: “viveksheshadri” .
Strings Conversion in Go
In Go, You can’t simply cast a number to a string and it does NOT work as you may expect
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
number := 728
str := string(number)
fmt.Println(str)
}
Outputs: {
Program exited.
Most notably from above exmaple, simply writing string(728) won’t work as you expected and the result will NOT be “728”
Solution
To convert a number to string, Go has defined function strconv.Itoa or fmt.sprintf as below.
- Using function strconv.Itoa
number := 728
strConv := strconv.Itoa(number)
fmt.Println(strConv)
Outputs: 728
- Using function fmt.sprintf
number := 234
strB := fmt.Sprintf("%d", number)
fmt.Println(strB)
Outputs: 234
Strings to byte slices in Go
In many languages functions will only accepts a string or a byte slice, and converting them back and forth can be tricky. but in Go strings can be converted into byte slices, and byte slices can be converted into strings, will see how with an example below.
- Converting string to a byte slice
package main
import "fmt"
var byt []byte
func main() {
str := "a string"
byt = []byte(str)
fmt.Println(byt)
}
Outputs: [97 32 115 116 114 105 110 103]
- To converting back the above byte slice value to a string
var str string
str = string(byt)
Complete code reference
I have created complete code examples mentioned above in the go playgroud where you can play around for better learning and also i have placed the same in the github gist for reference.
Hope these tips help you out in writing more efficient Go, I will post more topics, tricks and tips on Go in my next post.