Working with Go

Working with Slices

Go has an array type, but it has a fixed size. Slices in Go are dynamically-sized and more flexible. Slices are the common data type you will work with.

The specification for slices are []T where T is the type, for example []string is a set of strings, or []int is a set of integers.

Initialize

Initialize an empty slice.

var empty []int

Initialize a slice with values.

alphas := []string{"abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl"}

Append

Slices can not be modified, a new copy needs to be made, it is common to copy to the same variable.

var nums []int
nums = append(nums, 203)
nums = append(nums, 302)
fmt.Println(nums)
// [203 302]

Append multiple values at once.

alphas := []string{"abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl"}
alphas = append(alphas, "mno", "pqr", "stu")

Common Array Operations

Get length of a slice.

fmt.Println("Length: ", len(alphas))

Retrieve a single element from slice

fmt.Println(alphas[1])

Retrieve a slice of a slice

alpha2 := alphas[1:3]
fmt.Println(alpha2)

Element Exists in a Slice

There is no built-in function to determine if an element exists in a slice. Here is an example function to check if a string exists in an array of strings.

package main
 
import "fmt"
 
func main() {
 
    alphas := []string{"abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl"}
 
    if elemExists("def", alphas) {
        fmt.Println("Exists!")
    }
}
 
func elemExists(s string, a []string) bool {
    for _, v := range a {
        if v == s {
            return true
        }
    }
    return false
}