What is the difference between Go's runes and bytes for representing strings as arrays of characters?
In Go, a string is represented as a sequence of bytes, and each byte represents a single character in the string. However, this approach poses a problem when dealing with non-ASCII characters or characters outside of the ASCII range. For example, the UTF-8 encoding of the character 'é' requires two bytes.
To address this issue, Go provides the **rune**
type, which represents a Unicode code point, which is a numeric value that corresponds to a particular character in the Unicode standard. A rune is represented by a 32-bit integer value in Go.
When dealing with strings in Go, it is often necessary to convert between bytes and runes. The **[]byte**
type represents a byte array, and the **[]rune**
type represents a rune array. The **[]byte**
type can be converted to a **[]rune**
type using the **[]rune()**
conversion function, and the **[]rune**
type can be converted to a **[]byte**
type using the **[]byte()**
conversion function.
In summary, bytes are used to represent the raw data of a string, while runes are used to represent the individual characters of a string, including non-ASCII characters.