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Runes and String Encoding

In many programming languages (cough, C, cough), a "character" is a single byte. Using ASCII encoding, the standard for the C programming language, we can represent 128 characters with 7 bits. This is enough for the English alphabet, numbers, and some special characters.

In Go, strings are just sequences of bytes: they can hold arbitrary data. However, Go also has a special type, rune, which is an alias for int32. This means that a rune is a 32-bit integer, which is large enough to hold any Unicode code point.

When you're working with strings, you need to be aware of the encoding (bytes -> representation). Go uses UTF-8 encoding, which is a variable-length encoding.

What Does This Mean?

There are 2 main takeaways:

When you need to work with individual characters in a string, you should use the rune type. It breaks strings up into their individual characters, which can be more than one byte long.
We can include a wide variety of Unicode characters in our strings, such as emojis and Chinese characters, and Go will handle them just fine.

Assignment

Boots is a bear. (Not a dog, haters).

Run the code as-is. Notice that the simple string "boots" has 5 bytes, and 5 runes (characters).
Update the name constant to be the bear emoji instead of the word "boots".

🐻

If you've got it right, you should notice that the emoji is only one rune, but it takes up 4 bytes.