Iterating Over Strings by Runes in Go

In Go, when attempting to iterate over a string using indices, you may encounter an issue where str[i] returns a byte instead of a rune. This is because strings in Go are sequences of bytes, not runes.

To iterate over strings by runes, use the range keyword. For example:

for pos, char := range "日本語" {
    fmt.Printf("character %c starts at byte position %d\n", char, pos)
}

This will print:

character 日 starts at byte position 0
character 本 starts at byte position 3
character 語 starts at byte position 6

The range syntax does the following:

• Iterates from 0 to the length of the string
• For each position, extracts the rune at that position using the UTF-8 encoding