Working with Strings

String is one of the fundamental data types in Go.

Go uses immutable UTF-8-encoded strings. This might be confusing for a new developer; after all, this works:

x:="Hello"
x+=" World"
fmt.Println(x)
// Prints Hello World

Didn’t we just change x? Yes, we did. What is immutable here are the "Hello" and " World" strings. So, the string itself is immutable, but the string variable, x, is mutable. To modify string variables, you create slices of bytes or runes (which are mutable), work with them, and then convert them back to a string.

UTF-8 is the most common encoding used for web and internet technologies. This means that any time you deal with text in a Go program, you deal with UTF-8 strings. If you have to process data in a different encoding, you first translate it to UTF-8, process it, and encode it back to its original encoding.

UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding that uses one to four bytes for each...