Strings in Go

A string in Go is a sequence of byte values.

As we saw above you can define a string using this syntax:

var name = "test"

It’s important to note that unlike other languages, strings are defined only using double quotes, not single quotes.

To get the length of a string, use the built-in len() function:

len(name) //4

You can access individual characters using square brackets, passing the index of the character you want to get:

name[0] //"t" (indexes start at 0)
name[1] //"e"

You can get a portion of the string using this syntax:

name[0:2] //"te"
name[:2]  //"te"
name[2:]  //"st"

Using this you can create a copy of the string using

var newstring = name[:]

You can assigning a string to a new variable:

var first = "test"
var second = first

Strings are immutable, so you cannot update the value of a string.

Even if you assign a new value to first using an assignment operator, the value second is still going to be "test":

var first = "test"
var second = first

first = "another test"

first  //"another test"
second //"test"

Strings are reference types, which means if you pass a string to a function, the reference to the string will be copied, not its value. But since strings are immutable, in this case it’s not a big difference in practice with passing an int, for example.

You can concatenate two strings using the + operator:

var first = "first"
var second = "second"

var word = first + " " + second  //"first second"

Go provides several string utilities in the the strings package.

We already saw how to import a package in the “Hello, World!” example.

Here’s how you can import strings:

package main

import (
    "strings"
)

And then you can use it.

For example we can use the HasPrefix() function to see if a string starts with a specific substring:

package main

import (
    "strings"
)

func main() {
    strings.HasPrefix("test", "te") // true
}

The full list of methods can be found here: https://pkg.go.dev/strings

Here’s a list of methods you might use frequently:

• strings.ToUpper() returns a new string, uppercase
• strings.ToLower() returns a new string, lowercase
• strings.HasSuffix() checks if a string ends with a substring
• strings.HasPrefix() checks if a string starts with a substring
• strings.Contains() checks if a string contains a substring
• strings.Count() counts how many times a substring appears in a string
• strings.Join() used to join multiple strings and create a new one
• strings.Split() used to create an array of strings from a string, dividing the original one on a specific character, like a comma or a space
• strings.ReplaceAll() used to replace a portion in a string and replace it with a new one