How to Handle Unicode and UTF-8 in Go

Go handles Unicode and UTF-8 natively by representing all strings as UTF-8 byte sequences and using rune (an alias for int32) to represent individual Unicode code points. Use the unicode package for character classification and the utf8 package for encoding and decoding operations.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"unicode/utf8"
)

func main() {
	s := "Hello 世界"
	fmt.Println("String:", s)
	fmt.Println("Bytes:", len(s))
	fmt.Println("Runes:", utf8.RuneCountInString(s))

	for _, r := range s {
		fmt.Printf("Rune: %c (U+%04X)\n", r, r)
	}
}

Go treats text as a stream of bytes that follow the UTF-8 standard, which supports every character in the world. You don't need to manually convert text formats because the language handles the math automatically. Think of it like a universal translator that understands every language's alphabet without you needing to change settings.