UTF-8 Go and runes

UTF-8 is the most commonly used encoding. Google estimates that 50% of the pages that it sees are encoded in UTF-8. The ASCII set has the same encoding values in UTF-8, so a UTF-8 reader can read text consisting of just ASCII characters as well as text from the full Unicode set.

Go uses UTF-8 encoded characters in its strings. Each character is of type rune. This is a alias for int32 as a Unicode character can be 1, 2 or 4 bytes in UTF-8 encoding. In terms of characters, a string is an array of runes.

A string is also an array of bytes, but you have to be careful: only for the ASCII subset is a byte equal to a character. All other characters occupy two, three or four bytes. This means that the length of a string in characters (runes) is generally not the same as the length of its byte array. They are only equal when the string consists of ASCII characters only.

The following program fragment illustrates this. If we take a UTF-8 string and test its length, you get the length of the underlying byte array. But if you cast the string to an array of runes []rune then you get an array of the Unicode code points which is generally the number of characters:

str := "百度一下，你就知道"
println("String length", len([]rune(str)))
println("Byte length", len(str))

prints

String length 9
Byte length 27

UTF-8 client and server

Possibly surprisingly, you need do nothing special to handle UTF-8 text in either the client or the server. The underlying data type for a UTF-8 string in Go is a byte array, and as we saw just above, Go looks after encoding the string into 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes as needed. The length of the string is the length of the byte array, so you write any UTF-8 string by writing the byte array.

Similarly to read a string, you just read into a byte array and then cast the array to a string using string([]byte). If Go cannot properly decode bytes into Unicode characters, then it gives the Unicode Replacement Character \uFFFD. The length of the resulting byte array is the length of the legal portion of the string.

So the clients and servers given in earlier chapters work perfectly well with UTF-8 encoded text.

ASCII client and server

The ASCII characters have the same encoding in ASCII and in UTF-8. So ordinary UTF-8 character handling works fine for ASCII characters. No special handling need to be done.