The Secret of Converting byte to string in Go

First let’s consider how to convert a byte to a string? Simple, the language specification tells us, just do it like string(the_byte). But there is a secret here, see the following code:

Guess what you get? The result is:

Suprizing, huh! The result for 0x80 is c280! If you change the modifier in fmt from %x to %q, you can see more clearly:

When converting a byte to a string using string(the_byte), the result is an encoded one. So you get "\u0080" from string(0x80). It applies to not only byte, but all integer types.

This isn’t the case we see in C or C++. So, how do we get string "\0x80" form byte 0x80. You will have to do it with byte slice:

Another way to do is using bytes.Buffer:

bytes.Buffer is very efficient, according to the benchmark, it is the faster way to concatenate a string, better than slice appending and operator ‘+’.