What's the Most Efficient Way to Convert Strings to Byte Arrays in Go?

How to Efficiently Convert Strings to Byte Arrays in Go

When working with binary data in Go, it is often necessary to convert strings to byte arrays. There are several approaches to achieve this, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Unsafe but Fast: Using Byte Slicing

The snippet provided in the question uses a for loop to manually assign each byte of the string to the byte array:

for k, v := range []byte(str) {
  arr[k] = byte(v)
}

While this method is efficient in terms of speed, it is also unsafe as it does not perform any bounds checking and can lead to runtime errors if the destination array is too small.

Safe and Simple: Using the Byte Literal

A more concise and safe approach is to use the byte literal syntax:

[]byte("Here is a string....")

This method directly constructs a byte array from the provided string, without the need for manual conversion or loops.

Other Alternatives

• copy: The copy function can be used to transfer data between two byte arrays or between a string and a byte array, provided that the destination array has sufficient capacity.
• strings.NewReader: For situations where the string is long and stored as an io.Reader, the strings.NewReader function can be used to create a byte array from the string's representation as a stream of bytes.

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