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 actual version of benchmark provided by @cd1 (Go 1.8, linux x86_64) with the fixes of bugs mentioned by @icza and @PickBoy.

Bytes.Buffer is only 7 times faster than direct string concatenation via + operator.

package performance_test

import (
    "bytes"
    "fmt"
    "testing"
)

const (
    concatSteps = 100
)

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

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

Timings:

BenchmarkConcat-4                             300000          6869 ns/op
BenchmarkBuffer-4                            1000000          1186 ns/op

Answer 2

goutils.JoinBetween

 func JoinBetween(in []string, separator string, startIndex, endIndex int) string {
    if in == nil {
        return ""
    }

    noOfItems := endIndex - startIndex

    if noOfItems <= 0 {
        return EMPTY
    }

    var builder strings.Builder

    for i := startIndex; i < endIndex; i++ {
        if i > startIndex {
            builder.WriteString(separator)
        }
        builder.WriteString(in[i])
    }
    return builder.String()
}