How to get the number of Characters in a String?
How can I get the number of characters of a string in Go?
For example, if I have a string "hello" the method should return 5. I saw that len(str) returns the number of bytes and not the number of characters so len("£") returns 2 instead of 1 because £ is encoded with two bytes in UTF-8.
Answer
You can try RuneCountInString from the utf8 package.
returns the number of runes in p
that, as illustrated in this script: the length of "World" might be 6 (when written in Chinese: "世界"), but its rune count is 2:
package main
import "fmt"
import "unicode/utf8"
func main() {
fmt.Println("Hello, 世界", len("世界"), utf8.RuneCountInString("世界"))
}
Phrozen adds in the comments:
Actually you can do len() over runes by just type casting.
len([]rune("世界")) will print 2. At leats in Go 1.3.
And with CL 108985 (May 2018, for Go 1.11), len([]rune(string)) is now optimized. (Fixes issue 24923)
The compiler detects len([]rune(string)) pattern automatically, and replaces it with for r := range s call.
Adds a new runtime function to count runes in a string. Modifies the compiler to detect the pattern
len([]rune(string))and replaces it with the new rune counting runtime function.RuneCount/lenruneslice/ASCII 27.8ns ± 2% 14.5ns ± 3% -47.70% RuneCount/lenruneslice/Japanese 126ns ± 2% 60 ns ± 2% -52.03% RuneCount/lenruneslice/MixedLength 104ns ± 2% 50 ns ± 1% -51.71%
Stefan Steiger points to the blog post "Text normalization in Go"
What is a character?
As was mentioned in the strings blog post, characters can span multiple runes.
For example, an 'e' and '◌́◌́' (acute "\u0301") can combine to form 'é' ("e\u0301" in NFD). Together these two runes are one character.The definition of a character may vary depending on the application.
For normalization we will define it as:
- a sequence of runes that starts with a starter,
- a rune that does not modify or combine backwards with any other rune,
- followed by possibly empty sequence of non-starters, that is, runes that do (typically accents).
The normalization algorithm processes one character at at time.
Using that package and its Iter type, the actual number of "character" would be:
package main
import "fmt"
import "golang.org/x/text/unicode/norm"
func main() {
var ia norm.Iter
ia.InitString(norm.NFKD, "école")
nc := 0
for !ia.Done() {
nc = nc + 1
ia.Next()
}
fmt.Printf("Number of chars: %d\n", nc)
}
Here, this uses the Unicode Normalization form NFKD "Compatibility Decomposition"
Oliver's answer points to UNICODE TEXT SEGMENTATION as the only way to reliably determining default boundaries between certain significant text elements: user-perceived characters, words, and sentences.
For that, you need an external library like rivo/uniseg, which does Unicode Text Segmentation.
That will actually count "grapheme cluster", where multiple code points may be combined into one user-perceived character.
package uniseg
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/rivo/uniseg"
)
func main() {
gr := uniseg.NewGraphemes("👍🏼!")
for gr.Next() {
fmt.Printf("%x ", gr.Runes())
}
// Output: [1f44d 1f3fc] [21]
}
Two graphemes, even though there are three runes (Unicode code points).
You can see other examples in "How to manipulate strings in GO to reverse them?"
👩🏾🦰 alone is one grapheme, but, from unicode to code points converter, 4 runes: