Explore fun brain teasers to hone your logic, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. Gain insights into Go and practice to avoid future mistakes.

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Who knew puzzles could be fun? Puzzles and brain teasers are a great way to practice your critical thinking and improve your logic and problem-solving skills. This course provides a basic understanding of Go. The teasers in this course will help you practice what you already know and help avoid future mistakes.

Go Brain Teasers

# Try it yourself ## 
Try executing the code below to see the result for yourself.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
)

func main() {
	city := "Kraków"
	fmt.Println(len(city))
}



# Explanation ##

If we count the number of characters in “Kraków,” we’ll count six. However, they are considered seven characters. Why?? The reason is … history.

In the beginning, computers were invented by English-speaking countries: the UK and the US. Initially, developers found it difficult to encode text in computers, since they only understood bits. They found a way to encode information with the following scheme. Use a **byte** (8 bits) to represent a character. For example, **a** is 97 (01100001), **b** is 98, and so on.

> **Note**: One byte is enough for the English alphabet, containing twenty-six lowercase letters, twenty-six uppercase letters, and ten digits. There is also space for other special characters (for example, 9 for tab). This is known as **ASCII encoding**.

In later years, there was an increase in computer usage and other countries wanted to write using their native languages. ASCII wasn’t good enough; a single byte isn’t big enough to hold all the numbers needed to represent letters in different languages. This led to several different encoding schemes; the most common one is `UTF-8`. Rob Pike, one of the designers of Go, is also one of the designers
of `UTF-8`.

Go strings are `UTF-8` encoded. This means that a character (called *rune*) can
be 1-4 bytes in length. In Go, we can determine the length of a string by obtaining the size in bytes. In this example, the rune “ó” is taking two bytes while the other runes take one byte each; so, the total length of the string is seven.



Understand how the counting process today is different from history.

Before We Begin

Puzzles

Wrapping Up

Puzzle 3 Explanation: ASCII Encoding

Try it yourself

Explanation