Learning Go Programming

Rune and string types

In order to start our discussion about the rune and string types, some background context is in order. Go can treat character and string literal constants in its source code as Unicode. It is a global standard whose goal is to catalog symbols for known writing systems by assigning a numerical value (known as code point) to each character.

By default, Go inherently supports UTF-8 which is an efficient way of encoding and storing Unicode numerical values. That is all the background needed to continue with this subject. No further detail will be discussed as it is beyond the scope of this book.

The rune

So, what exactly does the rune type have to do with Unicode? The rune is an alias for the int32 type. It is specifically intended ...