Best way to Concatenate Strings in Go

To concatenate strings in Go (aka Golang) we can use strings.Builder and bytes.Buffer types.

In Go language, string is a primitive type and it is immutable.

Whenever we change a string or append to another string, we will be creating a new string.

Because of this reason concatenating strings using + operator can be inefficient while joining a lot of strings together.

So using strings.Builder and bytes.Buffer types is the best way to concatenate multiple strings together, when we dont know the length of the resulting string.

Using strings.Builder #

The Builder type is added in Go 1.10 version as part of strings package.

A Builder is used to efficiently build a string using Write methods. It minimizes memory copying.

We can use WriteString function of Builder type to concatenate strings.

package main

import (
    "strings"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    
	var concatenatestrings strings.Builder

    for i := 0; i < 1000; i++ {
        concatenatestrings.WriteString("str")
    }

    fmt.Println(concatenatestrings.String())
}

If you are using older versions Go language, you can use bytes.Buffer package.

Using bytes.Buffer #

The usage of bytes.Buffer type is similar to strings.Builder type.

It also contains method WriteString which is used to concatenate strings.

package main

import (
    "bytes"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    
	var concatenatestrings bytes.Buffer

    for i := 0; i < 1000; i++ {
        concatenatestrings.WriteString("str")
    }

    fmt.Println(concatenatestrings.String())
}