Search and Replace in a String

· 201 words · 1 minute read

As programmers we often need to take a string and replace parts of it with something else. The code below has three examples, first of which is a basic ‘find all’ and replace, the second changes only the first occurrence of ‘sound’ and finally the third example demonstrates how to change a string containing quotes to use escaped quotes. These are changed by using the 4th argument to define how many times to replace, with -1 being every time.

All this functionality is managed by the strings package and the Replace function (view docs).

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "strings"
)

func main() {

    // Example 1: Willkommen to GoLangCode.com
    myText := "Welcome to GoLangCode.com"
    myText = strings.Replace(myText, "Welcome", "Willkommen", -1)
    fmt.Println(myText)

    // Example 2: Change first occurrence
    // Output: The car sounds sound
    myText = "The sound sounds sound"
    myText = strings.Replace(myText, "sound", "car", 1)
    fmt.Println(myText)

    // Example 3: Replacing quotes (double backslash needed)
    // Output: I \'quote\' this text
    myText = "I 'quote' this text"
    myText = strings.Replace(myText, "'", "\\'", -1)
    fmt.Println(myText)
}

search and replace within string in golang

Image of Author Edd Turtle

Author:  Edd Turtle

Edd is the Lead Developer at Hoowla, a prop-tech startup, where he spends much of his time working on production-ready Go and PHP code. He loves coding, but also enjoys cycling and camping in his spare time.

See something which isn't right? You can contribute to this page on GitHub or just let us know in the comments below - Thanks for reading!