CODEWITHSUNDEEP
stringgo
shivams
shivams

Reputation: 2717

Cannot assign string with single quote in golang

I am learning go and when playing with string I noticed that if a string is in single quotes then golang is giving me an error but double quotes are working fine. 

func main() {
    var a string
    a = 'hello' //will give error
    a = "hello" //will not give error
}

This is the error I get on my system:

illegal rune literal

While when I try to do the same on playground I am getting this error:

prog.go:9: missing '
prog.go:9: syntax error: unexpected name, expecting semicolon or newline or }
prog.go:9: newline in string
prog.go:9: empty character literal or unescaped ' in character literal
prog.go:9: missing '

I am not able to understand the exact reason behind this as in for example Python, Perl one can declare a string with both single and double quote.

Upvotes: 57

Views: 37842

Answers (4)

ti7
ti7

Reputation: 18792

In Go, '⌘' represents a single character (called a Rune), whereas "⌘" represents a string containing the character ⌘.

This is true in many programming languages where the difference between strings and characters is notable, such as C++ 1.

Check out the "Code points, characters, and runes" section in the Go Blog on Strings

1 Note that strings in Go are not null terminated \0 and instead represented by a pointer to their start and an integer length.

Upvotes: 96

Tawseef Bhat
Tawseef Bhat

Reputation: 460

Double, Single and Back quotes

Double and back quotes can be used to define a string.

Single quotes will not allow to put more than one characters. If a string with escape characters is formatted in double quotes, escape characters can be interpreted. If a string with escape characters is formatted in back quotes, escape characters are ignored.

Single quotes A character is formatted in single quotes can either be a byte or a rune. If we don’t declare the type, the default type will be rune.

Upvotes: 0

Jawadh Salih Rifath
Jawadh Salih Rifath

Reputation: 150

Go is a statically typed language. Also Go is not a scripting language. Though we see Go is running like a scripting language, it is compiling the source we write and then execute the main function. So, we should treat Go as C, Java, C++ where single quote ' is used to declare characters (rune, char) unlike scripting languages like Python or JavaScript.

I think as this is a new language, and current trend is lying with scripting languages, this confusion has been occurred.

Upvotes: 1

Zombo
Zombo

Reputation: 1

Another option, if you are wanting to embed double quotes:

package main

func main() {
   s := `west "north" east`
   println(s)
}

https://golang.org/ref/spec#raw_string_lit

Upvotes: 4

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