I'm having some trouble while reading a file which has a fixed column length format. Some columns may contain umlauts.
Umlauts seem to use 2 bytes instead of one. This is not the behaviour I was expecting. Is there any kind of function which returns a substring? Slice does not seem to work in this case.
Here's some sample code:
http://play.golang.org/p/ZJ1axy7UXe
umlautsString := "Rhön"
fmt.Println(len(umlautsString))
fmt.Println(umlautsString[0:4])
Prints:
5
Rhö
In go, a slice of a string counts bytes, not runes. This is why "Rhön"[0:3] gives you Rh and the first byte of ö.
Characters encoded in UTF-8 are represented as runes because UTF-8 encodes characters in more than one
byte (up to four bytes) to provide a bigger range of characters.
If you want to slice a string with the [] syntax, convert the string to []rune before.
Example (on play):
umlautsString := "Rhön"
runes = []rune(umlautsString)
fmt.Println(string(runes[0:3])) // Rhö
Noteworthy: This golang blog post about string representation in go.
You can convert string to []rune and work with it:
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
umlautsString := "Rhön"
fmt.Println(len(umlautsString))
subStrRunes:= []rune(umlautsString)
fmt.Println(len(subStrRunes))
fmt.Println(string(subStrRunes[0:4]))
}
http://play.golang.org/p/__WfitzMOJ
Hope that helps!
Another option is the utf8string package:
package main
import "golang.org/x/exp/utf8string"
func main() {
s := utf8string.NewString("🧡💛💚💙💜")
// example 1
n := s.RuneCount()
println(n == 5)
// example 2
t := s.Slice(0, 2)
println(t == "🧡💛")
}
https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/exp/utf8string
Related
I'm teaching myself Go from a C background.
The code below works as I expect (the first two Printf() will access bytes, the last two Printf() will access codepoints).
What I am not clear is if this involves any copying of data.
package main
import "fmt"
var a string
func main() {
a = "èe"
fmt.Printf("%d\n", a[0])
fmt.Printf("%d\n", a[1])
fmt.Println("")
fmt.Printf("%d\n", []rune(a)[0])
fmt.Printf("%d\n", []rune(a)[1])
}
In other words:
does []rune("string") create an array of runes and fill it with the runes corresponding to "string", or it's just the compiler that figures out how to get runes from the string bytes?
It is not possible to turn []uint8 (i.e. a string) into []int32 (an alias for []rune) without allocating an array.
Also, strings are immutable in Go but slices are not, so the conversion to both []byte and []rune must copy the string's bytes in some way or another.
It involves a copy because:
strings are immutable; if the conversion []rune(s) didn't make a copy, you would be able to index the rune slice and change the string contents
a string value is a "(possibly empty) sequence of bytes", where byte is an alias of uint8, whereas a rune is a "an integer value identifying a Unicode code point" and an alias of int32. The types are not identical and even the lengths may not be the same:
a = "èe"
r := []rune(a)
fmt.Println(len(a)) // 3 (3 bytes)
fmt.Println(len(r)) // 2 (2 Unicode code points)
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.
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 the rune count of "世界" 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 least 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:
👩: women (1f469)
dark skin (1f3fe)
ZERO WIDTH JOINER (200d)
🦰red hair (1f9b0)
There is a way to get count of runes without any packages by converting string to []rune as len([]rune(YOUR_STRING)):
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
russian := "Спутник и погром"
english := "Sputnik & pogrom"
fmt.Println("count of bytes:",
len(russian),
len(english))
fmt.Println("count of runes:",
len([]rune(russian)),
len([]rune(english)))
}
count of bytes 30 16
count of runes 16 16
I should point out that none of the answers provided so far give you the number of characters as you would expect, especially when you're dealing with emojis (but also some languages like Thai, Korean, or Arabic). VonC's suggestions will output the following:
fmt.Println(utf8.RuneCountInString("🏳️🌈🇩🇪")) // Outputs "6".
fmt.Println(len([]rune("🏳️🌈🇩🇪"))) // Outputs "6".
That's because these methods only count Unicode code points. There are many characters which can be composed of multiple code points.
Same for using the Normalization package:
var ia norm.Iter
ia.InitString(norm.NFKD, "🏳️🌈🇩🇪")
nc := 0
for !ia.Done() {
nc = nc + 1
ia.Next()
}
fmt.Println(nc) // Outputs "6".
Normalization is not really the same as counting characters and many characters cannot be normalized into a one-code-point equivalent.
masakielastic's answer comes close but only handles modifiers (the rainbow flag contains a modifier which is thus not counted as its own code point):
fmt.Println(GraphemeCountInString("🏳️🌈🇩🇪")) // Outputs "5".
fmt.Println(GraphemeCountInString2("🏳️🌈🇩🇪")) // Outputs "5".
The correct way to split Unicode strings into (user-perceived) characters, i.e. grapheme clusters, is defined in the Unicode Standard Annex #29. The rules can be found in Section 3.1.1. The github.com/rivo/uniseg package implements these rules so you can determine the correct number of characters in a string:
fmt.Println(uniseg.GraphemeClusterCount("🏳️🌈🇩🇪")) // Outputs "2".
If you need to take grapheme clusters into account, use regexp or unicode module. Counting the number of code points(runes) or bytes also is needed for validaiton since the length of grapheme cluster is unlimited. If you want to eliminate extremely long sequences, check if the sequences conform to stream-safe text format.
package main
import (
"regexp"
"unicode"
"strings"
)
func main() {
str := "\u0308" + "a\u0308" + "o\u0308" + "u\u0308"
str2 := "a" + strings.Repeat("\u0308", 1000)
println(4 == GraphemeCountInString(str))
println(4 == GraphemeCountInString2(str))
println(1 == GraphemeCountInString(str2))
println(1 == GraphemeCountInString2(str2))
println(true == IsStreamSafeString(str))
println(false == IsStreamSafeString(str2))
}
func GraphemeCountInString(str string) int {
re := regexp.MustCompile("\\PM\\pM*|.")
return len(re.FindAllString(str, -1))
}
func GraphemeCountInString2(str string) int {
length := 0
checked := false
index := 0
for _, c := range str {
if !unicode.Is(unicode.M, c) {
length++
if checked == false {
checked = true
}
} else if checked == false {
length++
}
index++
}
return length
}
func IsStreamSafeString(str string) bool {
re := regexp.MustCompile("\\PM\\pM{30,}")
return !re.MatchString(str)
}
There are several ways to get a string length:
package main
import (
"bytes"
"fmt"
"strings"
"unicode/utf8"
)
func main() {
b := "这是个测试"
len1 := len([]rune(b))
len2 := bytes.Count([]byte(b), nil) -1
len3 := strings.Count(b, "") - 1
len4 := utf8.RuneCountInString(b)
fmt.Println(len1)
fmt.Println(len2)
fmt.Println(len3)
fmt.Println(len4)
}
Depends a lot on your definition of what a "character" is. If "rune equals a character " is OK for your task (generally it isn't) then the answer by VonC is perfect for you. Otherwise, it should be probably noted, that there are few situations where the number of runes in a Unicode string is an interesting value. And even in those situations it's better, if possible, to infer the count while "traversing" the string as the runes are processed to avoid doubling the UTF-8 decode effort.
I tried to make to do the normalization a bit faster:
en, _ = glyphSmart(data)
func glyphSmart(text string) (int, int) {
gc := 0
dummy := 0
for ind, _ := range text {
gc++
dummy = ind
}
dummy = 0
return gc, dummy
}
I have a word which contains some of these characters - šđžčć. When I take the first letter out of that word, I'll have a byte, when I convert that byte into string I'll get incorrectly decoded string.
Can someone help me figure out how to decode properly the extracter letter.
This is example code:
package main
import (
"fmt"
)
func main() {
word := "ŠKOLA"
c := word[0]
fmt.Println(word, string(c)) // ŠKOLA Å
}
https://play.golang.org/p/6T2FX4vN3-U
Š is more than one byte. One method to index runes is to convert the string to []rune
c := []rune(word)[0]
https://play.golang.org/p/NBUopxe-ik1
You can also use the functions provided in the utf8 package, like utf8.DecodeRune and utf8.DecodeRuneInString to iterate over the individual codepoints in the utf8 string.
r, _ := utf8.DecodeRuneInString(word)
fmt.Println(word, string(r))
I came across a function posted online that used the rune() function in golang, but I am having a hard time looking up what it is. I am going through the tutorial and inexperienced with the docs so it is hard to find what I am looking for.
Specifically, I am trying to see why this fails...
fmt.Println(rune("foo"))
and this does not
fmt.Println([]rune("foo"))
rune is a type in Go. It's just an alias for int32, but it's usually used to represent Unicode points. rune() isn't a function, it's syntax for type conversion into rune. Conversions in Go always have the syntax type() which might make them look like functions.
The first bit of code fails because conversion of strings to numeric types isn't defined in Go. However conversion of strings to slices of runes/int32s is defined like this in language specification:
Converting a value of a string type to a slice of runes type yields a
slice containing the individual Unicode code points of the string.
[golang.org]
So your example prints a slice of runes with values 102, 111 and 111
As stated in #Michael's first-rate comment fmt.Println([]rune("foo")) is a conversion of a string to a slice of runes []rune. When you convert from string to []rune, each utf-8 char in that string becomes a Rune. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/51611567/12817546. Similarly, in the reverse conversion, when converted from []rune to string, each rune becomes a utf-8 char in the string. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/51611567/12817546. A []rune can also be set to a byte, float64, int or a bool.
package main
import (
. "fmt"
)
func main() {
r := []rune("foo")
c := []interface{}{byte(r[0]), float64(r[0]), int(r[0]), r, string(r), r[0] != 0}
checkType(c)
}
func checkType(s []interface{}) {
for k, _ := range s {
Printf("%T %v\n", s[k], s[k])
}
}
byte(r[0]) is set to “uint8 102”, float64(r[0]) is set to “float64 102”,int(r[0]) is set to “int 102”, r is the rune” []int32 [102 111 111]”, string(r) prints “string foo”, r[0] != 0 and shows “bool true”.
[]rune to string conversion is supported natively by the spec. See the comment in https://stackoverflow.com/a/46021588/12817546. In Go then a string is a sequence of bytes. However, since multiple bytes can represent a rune code-point, a string value can also contain runes. So, it can be converted to a []rune , or vice versa. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/19325804/12817546.
Note, there are only two built-in type aliases in Go, byte (alias of uint8) and rune (alias of int32). See https://Go101.org/article/type-system-overview.html. Rune literals are just 32-bit integer values. For example, the rune literal 'a' is actually the number "97". See https://stackoverflow.com/a/19311218/12817546. Quotes edited.
I need to slice a string in Go. Possible values can contain Latin chars and/or Arabic/Chinese chars. In the following example, the slice annotation [:1] for the Arabic string alphabet is returning a non-expected value/character.
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
a := "a"
fmt.Println(a[:1]) // works
b := "ذ"
fmt.Println(b[:1]) // does not work
fmt.Println(b[:2]) // works
fmt.Println(len(a) == len(b)) // false
}
http://play.golang.org/p/R-JxaxbfNL
First of all, you should really read about strings, bytes and runes in Go.
And here is how you can achieve what you want: Go playground (I was not able to properly paste arabic symbols, but if Chinese works, arabic should work too).
s := "abcdefghijklmnop"
fmt.Println(s[2:9])
s = "维基百科:关于中文维基百科"
fmt.Println(string([]rune(s)[2:9]))
The output is:
cdefghi
百科:关于中文
You can use the utf8string package:
package main
import "golang.org/x/exp/utf8string"
func main() {
a := utf8string.NewString("🎈🎄🎀🎢👓")
// example 1
r := a.At(1)
// example 2
s := a.Slice(1, 3)
// example 3
n := a.RuneCount()
// print
println(r == '🎄', s == "🎄🎀", n == 5)
}
https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/exp/utf8string