This lesson's interactive features are locked, please to keep using them
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.
UTF-8 Text
One displayed symbol can contain multiple runes. Some emoji combine runes using a zero-width joiner (U+200D). The widget's 👨👩 contains three runes: two emoji and the joiner.
What Does This Mean?
There are 2 main takeaways:
When you need to work with individual characters in a string, you should use the
runetype. 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).
🐻If you've got it right, you should notice that the emoji is only one rune, but it takes up 4 bytes.