Flexible string representation, unicode, typography, ...

[Ian Kelly]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 9:47 AM,  <wxjmfauth at gmail.com> wrote:
> For those you do not know, the go language has introduced
> the rune type. As far as I know, nobody is complaining, I
> have not even seen a discussion related to this subject.

Python has that also.  We call it "int".

More seriously, strings in Go are not sequences of runes.  They're
actually arrays of UTF-8 bytes.  That means that they're quite
efficient for ASCII strings, at the expense of other characters, like
Chinese (wait, this sounds familiar for some reason).  It also means
that you have to bend over backwards if you want to work with actual
runes instead of bytes.  Want to know how many characters are in your
string?  Don't call len() on it -- that will only tell you how many
bytes are in it.  Don't try to index or slice it either -- that will
(accidentally) work for ASCII strings, but for other strings your
indexes will be wrong.  If you're unlucky you might even split up the
string in the middle of a character, and now your string has invalid
characters in it.  The right way to do it looks something like this:

len([]rune("白鵬翔"))  // get the length of the string in characters
string([]rune("白鵬翔")[0:2])  // get the substring containing the first
two characters

It reminds me of working in Python 2.X, except that instead of an
actual unicode type you just have arrays of ints.