In Go, a string is a primitive type, which means it is read-only, and every manipulation of it will create a new string.
So if I want to concatenate strings many times without knowing the length of the resulting string, what's the best way to do it?
The naive way would be:
var s string
for i := 0; i < 1000; i++ {
s += getShortStringFromSomewhere()
}
return s
but that does not seem very efficient.
I just benchmarked the top answer posted above in my own code (a recursive tree walk) and the simple concat operator is actually faster than the BufferString.
func (r *record) String() string {
buffer := bytes.NewBufferString("");
fmt.Fprint(buffer,"(",r.name,"[")
for i := 0; i < len(r.subs); i++ {
fmt.Fprint(buffer,"\t",r.subs[i])
}
fmt.Fprint(buffer,"]",r.size,")\n")
return buffer.String()
}
This took 0.81 seconds, whereas the following code:
func (r *record) String() string {
s := "(\"" + r.name + "\" ["
for i := 0; i < len(r.subs); i++ {
s += r.subs[i].String()
}
s += "] " + strconv.FormatInt(r.size,10) + ")\n"
return s
}
only took 0.61 seconds. This is probably due to the overhead of creating the new BufferString.
Update: I also benchmarked the join function and it ran in 0.54 seconds.
func (r *record) String() string {
var parts []string
parts = append(parts, "(\"", r.name, "\" [" )
for i := 0; i < len(r.subs); i++ {
parts = append(parts, r.subs[i].String())
}
parts = append(parts, strconv.FormatInt(r.size,10), ")\n")
return strings.Join(parts,"")
}