How to Work with Character Encodings (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1) in Go

Go treats all source code and string literals as UTF-8 by default, so you rarely need to manually handle ISO-8859-1 unless reading external binary data. Use the encoding package to convert byte slices from other encodings into UTF-8 strings before processing them.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"golang.org/x/text/encoding/charmap"
	"golang.org/x/text/transform"
	"io"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	// Read ISO-8859-1 file
	f, _ := os.Open("data.iso8859")
	defer f.Close()

	// Create a reader that transforms ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8
	reader := transform.NewReader(f, charmap.ISO8859_1.NewDecoder())
	content, _ := io.ReadAll(reader)

	fmt.Println(string(content))
}

Install the required dependency first: go get golang.org/x/text/encoding/charmap

Go assumes everything is UTF-8, which is the modern standard for text. If you have old files or data in formats like ISO-8859-1, you must translate them into UTF-8 before Go can read them correctly. Think of it like a translator converting a foreign language document into English so your team can understand it.