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unicodeutf-8go
Salah Eddine Taouririt
Salah Eddine Taouririt

Reputation: 26455

The difference between string literals and string values?

From strings blog post :

Some people think Go strings are always UTF-8, but they are not: only string literals are UTF-8. As we showed in the previous section, string values can contain arbitrary bytes; as we showed in this one, string literals always contain UTF-8 text as long as they have no byte-level escapes.

To summarize, strings can contain arbitrary bytes, but when constructed from string literals, those bytes are (almost always) UTF-8.

  1. Can you give me an example of a string literal that isn’t an ?
  2. What is the difference in between "string literal" , "string value" , "string literal without byte-level escapes" .

Upvotes: 3

Views: 411

Answers (1)

Volker
Volker

Reputation: 42431

Hope this helps:

  1. As 32bitkid mentioned: The following character in Go source code is a string literal whose value is not UTF-8 encoded: "\xbd\xb2\x3d\xbc\x20\xe2\x8c\x98".

  2. The idea of a "string literal" exists in Go source code only and has no representation in a compiled or even running program. A string literal in Go source code is written as "cat dog" and if your string literal needs to contain something your keyboard is missing (or your editor cannot display) you may use "byte level escapes" like this "cat\x07dog". Once your Go source code is compiled the notion of a string literal vanishes: There are only strings and they have some value. This value may be computed during the running time of your code or consist of values generated from "string literals" in your source.

"String literals" are to strings what "number literals" ar to ints: "abc" is a string literal and 20 is an int literal. Both may have different representations, e.g. "\x61bc" and 0x14. But once your code is compiled there is no difference whether your int value came from the literal 20 or 0x14. Same with strings. Only complication: Go source code is UTF-8 allways.

Upvotes: 7

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