Dealing with Unicode in Go

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8 pointshermanschaaf4 comments

Here's Rob Pike on this issue:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/1yL7IsqADSw/GS8F...

Golang's Unicode support (in 2012 at least) is "less than rudimentary".

In practice, I find Go's Unicode support superior to all the other languages I've shipped with --- C/C++, ObjC, Ruby, and Python, mostly --- mostly because it draws a line between "strings" and "byte vectors" (the way Cocoa does with NSData/NSString) and has a solid UTF-8 library. Your support for Unicode does need to be explicit and somewhat hand-rolled, but unlike (say) Ruby, the language doesn't trick you into thinking you're handling Unicode when you're not, and unlike Python, handling Unicode doesn't push you into an alternate type space.

(Conceding rapidly: I've shipped the least amount of code in Python and there is probably an elegant Pythonic solution I'm just not aware of).

I commented on the article, but here as well. When dealing with unicode in Go you should be converting strings to []rune

Is rune "right" even? I thought that rune was a single codepoint. How does that behave in the presence of combining characters or in non normalized unicode strings?

https://twitter.com/glitchr_

Yes it is a single codepoint. Normalization is a whole other issue, and a much less trivial one.

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