Go/Strings

Related: Rosalind/Problem 1A

The Go blog: strings, bytes, runes, and characters in Go: https://blog.golang.org/strings

How strings work in Go

A string in Go is a read-only slice of bytes. A string can hold arbitrary bytes, it is not required to hold unicode/UTF-8/other format. That means that "characters" are not special types in Go; rather, strings refer to bytes.

Indexing a string does not access characters - it accesses the individual bytes. So, when you store a character value in a string, you are storing the byte representation of that character at that point in time.

String Functions

To use string functions, you need to import strings:

package main

import "strings"

func main() {
    fmt.Println(strings.ToUpper("Hello world!"))
}

The functions provided by the strings package will then be available via, for example, strings.ToUpper().

To make this a little easier, you can do something analogous to Python's import X as Y:

package main

import s "strings"

func main() {
    fmt.Println(s.ToUpper("Hello world!"))
}

String Slices

See the Go/Slices page for notes on how array slices work.