Is there anyway to create null terminated string in Go?

Yash Srivastava picture Yash Srivastava · Jun 24, 2016 · Viewed 12.1k times · Source

Is there anyway to create null terminated string in Go?

What I'm currently trying is a:="golang\0" but it is showing compilation error:

non-octal character in escape sequence: "

Answer

icza picture icza · Jun 24, 2016

Spec: String literals:

The text between the quotes forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters.

So \0 is an illegal sequence, you have to use 3 octal digits:

s := "golang\000"

Or use hex code (2 hex digits):

s := "golang\x00"

Or a unicode sequence (4 hex digits):

s := "golang\u0000"

Example:

s := "golang\000"
fmt.Println([]byte(s))
s = "golang\x00"
fmt.Println([]byte(s))
s = "golang\u0000"
fmt.Println([]byte(s))

Output: all end with a 0-code byte (try it on the Go Playground).

[103 111 108 97 110 103 0]
[103 111 108 97 110 103 0]
[103 111 108 97 110 103 0]