How to Create a Byte Array in Golang

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Go has integer types called byte and rune epithets for uint8 and int32 data types. In Go, there is no char data type. Instead, it uses byte and rune to represent character values. The []byte and string in Go are small headers pointing to data that have lengths suggesting how much data is present. The []byte has two lengths:

  1. The current length of the data.
  2. Capacity.

A byte is one of the most used data types in Go, and let’s create one.

How to Create a byte in Go

To create a byte in Go, assign an ASCII character to a variable. A byte in Golang is an unsigned 8-bit integer.

The byte type represents ASCII characters, while the rune data type represents a broader set of Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8 format.

package main

import (
 "fmt"
)

func main() {
 var b1 byte = 65
 var b2 byte = 66

 fmt.Println(b1)
 fmt.Println(b2)
}

Output

65
66

To convert these ASCII numbers to characters, use the Printf(“%c”).

package main

import (
 "fmt"
)

func main() {
 var b1 byte = 65
 var b2 byte = 66

 fmt.Printf("%c\n", b1)
 fmt.Printf("%c\n", b2)
}

Output

A
B

How to Create a byte array in Golang

To create a byte array in Golang, use a slice of bytes []byte. Golang’s slice data type provides a suitable and efficient way of working with typed data sequences. 

Syntax

[]byte("Your String")

Example

package main

import (
 "fmt"
)

func main() {
 byteArray := []byte{97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102}
 fmt.Println(byteArray)
}

Output

[97 98 99 100 101 102]

For converting from a string to a byte slice, string -> []byte.

To convert a byte array to a string, use the string() constructor.

That’s it for this tutorial.

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