How to Access Individual Characters in a Go String Instead of Their Numerical Values?

Accessing Characters in a Go String

This question explores how to access characters within a Go string, delving into the nature of strings as slices of bytes and the relationship between characters, runes, and Unicode code points.

Original Question:

How can I obtain the "E" character instead of the numerical value 69 when accessing "HELLO"[1]?

Answer:

To retrieve characters from a string, one must understand Go's character representation. Interpreted string literals are sequences of characters encoded in UTF-8, where ASCII characters occupy just one byte. Hence, to get the "E" character, the following conversion is necessary:

fmt.Println(string("Hello"[1])) // ASCII only

Alternative: Using Runes

For Unicode support, runes, which represent Unicode code points, can be used. These are compatible with UTF-8 strings:

fmt.Println(string([]rune("Hello, 世界")[1])) // UTF-8

This code will output the "e" character.

Go's Character Handling Capabilities

It's worth noting that Go provides functions for converting between characters and bytes. For instance, the byte(c) method converts a character (rune) to its corresponding byte, while rune(b) converts a byte to a character.

Additional Readings:

• [Go Programming Language Specification section on Conversions](https://go.dev/ref/spec#Conversions)
• [The Go Blog: Strings, bytes, runes and characters in Go](https://blog.golang.org/strings)

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