How to efficiently concatenate strings in Go?

Question

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:

s := ""
for i := 0; i < 1000; i++ {
    s += getShortStringFromSomewhere()
}
return s

but that does not seem very efficient.

Answer 1

This is the fastest solution that does not require you to know or calculate the overall buffer size first:

var data []byte
for i := 0; i < 1000; i++ {
    data = append(data, getShortStringFromSomewhere()...)
}
return string(data)

By my benchmark, it's 20% slower than the copy solution (8.1ns per append rather than 6.72ns) but still 55% faster than using bytes.Buffer.

Answer 2

benchmark result with memory allocation statistics. check benchmark code at github.

use strings.Builder to optimize performance.

go test -bench . -benchmem
goos: darwin
goarch: amd64
pkg: github.com/hechen0/goexp/exps
BenchmarkConcat-8                1000000             60213 ns/op          503992 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkBuffer-8               100000000               11.3 ns/op             2 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkCopy-8                 300000000                4.76 ns/op            0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkStringBuilder-8        1000000000               4.14 ns/op            6 B/op          0 allocs/op
PASS
ok      github.com/hechen0/goexp/exps   70.071s

Answer 3

The most efficient way to concatenate strings is using the builtin function copy. In my tests, that approach is ~3x faster than using bytes.Buffer and much much faster (~12,000x) than using the operator +. Also, it uses less memory.

I've created a test case to prove this and here are the results:

BenchmarkConcat  1000000    64497 ns/op   502018 B/op   0 allocs/op
BenchmarkBuffer  100000000  15.5  ns/op   2 B/op        0 allocs/op
BenchmarkCopy    500000000  5.39  ns/op   0 B/op        0 allocs/op

---

Below is code for testing:

package main

import (
    "bytes"
    "strings"
    "testing"
)

func BenchmarkConcat(b *testing.B) {
    var str string
    for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
        str += "x"
    }
    b.StopTimer()

    if s := strings.Repeat("x", b.N); str != s {
        b.Errorf("unexpected result; got=%s, want=%s", str, s)
    }
}

func BenchmarkBuffer(b *testing.B) {
    var buffer bytes.Buffer
    for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
        buffer.WriteString("x")
    }
    b.StopTimer()

    if s := strings.Repeat("x", b.N); buffer.String() != s {
        b.Errorf("unexpected result; got=%s, want=%s", buffer.String(), s)
    }
}

func BenchmarkCopy(b *testing.B) {
    bs := make([]byte, b.N)
    bl := 0

    b.ResetTimer()
    for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
        bl += copy(bs[bl:], "x")
    }
    b.StopTimer()

    if s := strings.Repeat("x", b.N); string(bs) != s {
        b.Errorf("unexpected result; got=%s, want=%s", string(bs), s)
    }
}

// Go 1.10
func BenchmarkStringBuilder(b *testing.B) {
    var strBuilder strings.Builder

    b.ResetTimer()
    for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
        strBuilder.WriteString("x")
    }
    b.StopTimer()

    if s := strings.Repeat("x", b.N); strBuilder.String() != s {
        b.Errorf("unexpected result; got=%s, want=%s", strBuilder.String(), s)
    }
}

Answer 4

Take a look at the golang's strconv library giving access to several AppendXX functions, enabling us to concatenate strings with strings and other data types.

Answer 5

package main

import (
  "fmt"
)

func main() {
    var str1 = "string1"
    var str2 = "string2"
    out := fmt.Sprintf("%s %s ",str1, str2)
    fmt.Println(out)
}

Answer 6

There is a library function in the strings package called Join: http://golang.org/pkg/strings/#Join

A look at the code of Join shows a similar approach to Append function Kinopiko wrote: https://golang.org/src/strings/strings.go#L420

Usage:

import (
    "fmt";
    "strings";
)

func main() {
    s := []string{"this", "is", "a", "joined", "string\n"};
    fmt.Printf(strings.Join(s, " "));
}

$ ./test.bin
this is a joined string