[string] How to get the number of characters in a string

How can I get the number of characters of a string in Go?

For example, if I have a string "hello" the method should return 5. I saw that len(str) returns the number of bytes and not the number of characters so len("£") returns 2 instead of 1 because £ is encoded with two bytes in UTF-8.

There is a way to get count of runes without any packages by converting string to []rune as len([]rune(YOUR_STRING)):

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    russian := "??????? ? ??????"
    english := "Sputnik & pogrom"

    fmt.Println("count of bytes:",
        len(russian),
        len(english))

    fmt.Println("count of runes:",
        len([]rune(russian)),
        len([]rune(english)))

}

count of bytes 30 16

count of runes 16 16

If you need to take grapheme clusters into account, use regexp or unicode module. Counting the number of code points(runes) or bytes also is needed for validaiton since the length of grapheme cluster is unlimited. If you want to eliminate extremely long sequences, check if the sequences conform to stream-safe text format.

package main

import (
    "regexp"
    "unicode"
    "strings"
)

func main() {

    str := "\u0308" + "a\u0308" + "o\u0308" + "u\u0308"
    str2 := "a" + strings.Repeat("\u0308", 1000)

    println(4 == GraphemeCountInString(str))
    println(4 == GraphemeCountInString2(str))

    println(1 == GraphemeCountInString(str2))
    println(1 == GraphemeCountInString2(str2))

    println(true == IsStreamSafeString(str))
    println(false == IsStreamSafeString(str2))
}


func GraphemeCountInString(str string) int {
    re := regexp.MustCompile("\\PM\\pM*|.")
    return len(re.FindAllString(str, -1))
}

func GraphemeCountInString2(str string) int {

    length := 0
    checked := false
    index := 0

    for _, c := range str {

        if !unicode.Is(unicode.M, c) {
            length++

            if checked == false {
                checked = true
            }

        } else if checked == false {
            length++
        }

        index++
    }

    return length
}

func IsStreamSafeString(str string) bool {
    re := regexp.MustCompile("\\PM\\pM{30,}") 
    return !re.MatchString(str) 
}

There are several ways to get a string length:

package main

import (
    "bytes"
    "fmt"
    "strings"
    "unicode/utf8"
)

func main() {
    b := "?????"
    len1 := len([]rune(b))
    len2 := bytes.Count([]byte(b), nil) -1
    len3 := strings.Count(b, "") - 1
    len4 := utf8.RuneCountInString(b)
    fmt.Println(len1)
    fmt.Println(len2)
    fmt.Println(len3)
    fmt.Println(len4)

}

I should point out that none of the answers provided so far give you the number of characters as you would expect, especially when you're dealing with emojis (but also some languages like Thai, Korean, or Arabic). VonC's suggestions will output the following:

fmt.Println(utf8.RuneCountInString("??")) // Outputs "6".
fmt.Println(len([]rune("??"))) // Outputs "6".

That's because these methods only count Unicode code points. There are many characters which can be composed of multiple code points.

Same for using the Normalization package:

var ia norm.Iter
ia.InitString(norm.NFKD, "??")
nc := 0
for !ia.Done() {
    nc = nc + 1
    ia.Next()
}
fmt.Println(nc) // Outputs "6".

Normalization is not really the same as counting characters and many characters cannot be normalized into a one-code-point equivalent.

masakielastic's answer comes close but only handles modifiers (the rainbow flag contains a modifier which is thus not counted as its own code point):

fmt.Println(GraphemeCountInString("??"))  // Outputs "5".
fmt.Println(GraphemeCountInString2("??")) // Outputs "5".

The correct way to split Unicode strings into (user-perceived) characters, i.e. grapheme clusters, is defined in the Unicode Standard Annex #29. The rules can be found in Section 3.1.1. The github.com/rivo/uniseg package implements these rules so you can determine the correct number of characters in a string:

fmt.Println(uniseg.GraphemeClusterCount("??")) // Outputs "2".

Depends a lot on your definition of what a "character" is. If "rune equals a character " is OK for your task (generally it isn't) then the answer by VonC is perfect for you. Otherwise, it should be probably noted, that there are few situations where the number of runes in a Unicode string is an interesting value. And even in those situations it's better, if possible, to infer the count while "traversing" the string as the runes are processed to avoid doubling the UTF-8 decode effort.

I tried to make to do the normalization a bit faster:

    en, _ = glyphSmart(data)

    func glyphSmart(text string) (int, int) {
        gc := 0
        dummy := 0
        for ind, _ := range text {
            gc++
            dummy = ind
        }
        dummy = 0
        return gc, dummy
    }