How to get first character of a string in Golang

In this tutorial, we will learn how to get the first character of a given string in Golang.

In Golang, strings are the character sequence of bytes.

Getting the first character

To access the string’s first character, we can use the slice expression [] in Go.

Here is an example, that gets the first character L from the following string:

country := "London"
firstCharacter:= country[0:1]

fmt.Println(firstCharacter)

Output:

L

In the example above, we have passed [0:1] to the slice expression. so it starts the extraction at position 0 and ends at position 1 (which is excluded).

Note: The above syntax works on ASCII Characters.

For unicode characters, we can access the first character like this:

str := "😀😁😁"
result := []rune(str) // convert string to runes
firstCharacter := string(result[0:1]) // convert runes back to string

fmt.Println(firstCharacter)

Output:

😀