I am learning go and when playing with string I noticed that if a string is in single quotes then golang is giving me an error but double quotes are working fine.
func main() {
var a string
a = 'hello' //will give error
a = "hello" //will not give error
}
This is the error I get on my system:
illegal rune literal
While when I try to do the same on playground I am getting this error:
prog.go:9: missing '
prog.go:9: syntax error: unexpected name, expecting semicolon or newline or }
prog.go:9: newline in string
prog.go:9: empty character literal or unescaped ' in character literal
prog.go:9: missing '
I am not able to understand the exact reason behind this as in for example Python, Perl one can declare a string with both single and double quote.
In Go, '⌘' represents a single character (called a Rune), whereas "⌘" represents a string containing the character ⌘.
This is true in many programming languages where the difference between strings and characters is notable, such as C++.
Check out the "Code points, characters, and runes" section in the Go Blog on Strings
Go is a statically typed language. Also GO is not a scripting language. Though we see GO is running like a scripting language, it is compiling the source we write and then execute the main function. So, we should treat GO as C, JAVA, C++ where single quote '' is used to declare characters (rune, char) unlike scripting languages like Python or JavaScript.
I think as this is a new language, and current trend is lying with scripting languages, this confusion has been occurred.