golang-bytes-notes.md

Golang Bytes Notes

Most strings in Go are dealt with as byte slices []byte. Here's some further information from the Go blog about this.

Building up a string with bytes.Buffer

The bytes.Buffer type implements the io.Writer interface and provides some convenience methods for working with a slice of bytes.

You can create a empty bytes buffer:

buf := new(bytes.Buffer)

And then you can write to it:

buf.Write([]byte("Hello, World!"))

Or, you could write this:

var buf bytes.Buffer
&buf.Write([]byte("Hello, World!"))

In these examples, we are casting the strings to []byte so we can use the Write method. You can also use strings directly with the WriteString method.

var buf bytes.Buffer
buf.WriteString("Hello, World!")

And then we can get the string with the String method so we can print it out:

fmt.Println(buf.String())

You can use the fmt package to print out the value, but you can also write the contents of a bytes.Buffer to an io.Writer with the WriteTo method (here we're using os.Stdout as our io.Writer).

buf.WriteTo(os.Stdout)