Exploring and Mastering the Full Go Featureset/

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Strings

Strings

Learn about strings and byte arrays in Go.

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Strings in Go

Internally a Go string is defined like this:

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type StringHeader struct {
    Data uintptr
    Len int
}

A string itself is a value type, it has a pointer to a byte array and a fixed length. Zero byte in a string doesn’t mark the end of the string as it does in C. There can be any data inside of a string. Usually that data is encoded as a UTF-8 string, but it doesn’t have to be.

Strings can’t be nil

Strings are never nil in Go. The default value of a string is an empty string, not nil:

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package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
    var s string
    fmt.Println(s == "") // true
    s = nil // error: cannot use nil as type string in assignment
}

Strings are immutable (sort of)

Go does not ...