On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 11:00 AM Kamil Ziemian <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello, > > I read quite a few blog posts, articles, listen to nice number to talks > about strings, runes and encoding in Go. I now reading Go Language Spec and > I just stuck in the section about runes. I mean, it isn't hard as itself, > but it raises to much questions to me. I decided that I need to learn more > about Unicode and UTF-8, so from today I'm reading Unicode Technical Site > (?), currently the Glossary (https://www.unicode.org/glossary/). But I > can't understand one thing: when in practice you should use runes? > > My understanding at this moment is like that. Unicode assign every symbol > a number (at this moment I disregard normalization and any other more > advance stuff), rune is alias for int32 that stores integer representation > of this number. UTF-8 is variable size encoding using one or more bytes to > encode symbol and shouldn't and DOESN'T represent integer value of symbols > Unicode number. Virtues of UTF-8 are clear as how it allows to save a space > is clear to me, but I can't find a reason why I should transform my text to > runes? In Go stdlib there is a RuneReader interface (?) so this reason must > exists, but I just can't find anything. Maybe it have something to do with > sending information using internet? I don't know, this is totally outside > my humble knowledge. > In general, you should work with runes whenever you are working with text that is entered by humans, or text that will be read by humans. When you work with a string as a stream of bytes, then you either assume the string does not contain any bytes over 127, or you have to decode the UTF-8 string yourself. Working with runes eliminates both problems. > > You can say, that since I don't see a reason to use runes, I probably > shouldn't care about it. This is a valid point, but I want to know Go > reasonable well and constantly find code with runes which reason of > existence I don't understand (e.g. functions in stdlib that operates on > runes) is quite demoralising to me. > > Best > Kamil > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "golang-nuts" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/f3dad0e1-cd25-4e33-a7f2-34e0118bf68an%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/f3dad0e1-cd25-4e33-a7f2-34e0118bf68an%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAMV2Rqovfg9k9ALawv%2BC36_AxT0sbOb%2BEpcpKNO9r2kmg_T1nQ%40mail.gmail.com.
