Go Lang

Golang has two additional integer types called byte and rune that are aliases for uint8 and int32 data types respectively -

Type Alias For byte uint8 rune int32 In Go, the byte and rune data types are used to distinguish characters from integer values.

Golang doesn’t have a char data type. It uses byte and rune to represent character values. The byte data type represents ASCII characters and the rune data type represents a more broader set of Unicode characters that are encoded in UTF-8 format.

Characters are expressed in Golang by enclosing them in single quotes like this: 'A'.

The default type for character values is rune. That means, if you don’t declare a type explicitly when declaring a variable with a character value, then Go will infer the type as rune -

var firstLetter = 'A' // Type inferred as `rune` (Default type for character values)
You can create a byte variable by explicitly specifying the type -

var lastLetter byte = 'Z'
Both byte and rune data types are essentially integers. For example, a byte variable with value 'a' is converted to the integer 97.

Similarly, a rune variable with a unicode value '♥' is converted to the corresponding unicode codepoint U+2665, where U+ means unicode and the numbers are hexadecimal, which is essentially an integer.

package main
import "fmt"

func main() {
	var myByte byte = 'a'
	var myRune rune = '♥'

	fmt.Printf("%c = %d and %c = %U\n", myByte, myByte, myRune, myRune)
}

Output

a = 97 and ♥ = U+2665

In the above example, I’ve printed the variable myByte in character and decimal format, and the variable myRune in character and Unicode format.