Golang program to sort a string

A string in Golang is a collection of characters. Since strings in Go are immutable, they cannot be modified after they have been produced. Concatenating or adding to an existing string, however, enables the creation of new strings. A built-in type in Go, the string type can be used in a variety of ways much like any other data type. In this article, we will learn different techniques to sort a string using different set of examples.

Syntax

func Split(str, sep string) []string

Split() function is used to split a string through a provided separator. This function is present in strings package and it accepts the string to split as an argument along with a separator. The function then returns the final array of strings as a result.

func Strings(src []string) []string

The strings function is defined in sort package. This function takes the array in string format that we wish to sort and returns the result by sorting that array.

Algorithm

• Step 1 − Create a package main and declare fmt(format package) ,sort and strings package

• Step 2 − Star the main function

• Step 3 − Split the string into single characters

• Step 4 − Using the internal function to sort the Characters and combine them in string

• Step 5 − Print the output

Example1

In this example, we will use sort.Slice function to sort the unsorted string. The output printed on the console will be a sorted string. Let’s see through the code and the algorithm to know how to execute this program.

package main
import (
   "fmt"
   "sort" //import fmt and sort package
)

//create main function to execute the program
func main() {
   unsorted_str := "ghfisaw" //create unsorted string
   fmt.Println("The unsorted string is:", unsorted_str)
   chars := []rune(unsorted_str)
   sort.Slice(chars, func(i, j int) bool { //sort the string using the function
      return chars[i] < chars[j]
   })
   fmt.Println("The sorted string is:")
   fmt.Println(string(chars)) //print the string on the console
}

Output

The unsorted string is: ghfisaw
The sorted string is:
afghisw

Example 2

In this example, we will see how to sort a string using sort.Slice function. Here, the unsorted string will be converted to rune and it is passed as input in the sort.Slice function to sort the string.

package main
import (
   "fmt"
   "sort" //import fmt and sort package
)

//create a main function to execute the program
func main() {
   unsorted_str := "dbl" //create an unsorted string
   fmt.Println("The unsorted string created here is:", unsorted_str)
   strrunes := []rune(unsorted_str) //convert the string to rune
   sort.Slice(strrunes, func(i, j int) bool {
      return strrunes[i] < strrunes[j] //sort the string rune
   })
   fmt.Println("The sorted string is:")
   fmt.Println(string(strrunes)) //print sorted string
}

Output

The unsorted string created here is: dbl
The sorted string is:
bdl

Example 3

In this example we will sort the string using strings.split function and sort.Strings. The former is used to split the characters and the latter is used to sort the characters. The output will be printed on the console using fmt.Println() function.

package main
import (
   "fmt"
   "sort"
   "strings" //import fmt, sort and strings package
)

//create a main function to execute the program
func main() {
   unsorted_str := "kertgld" //create an unsorted string
   fmt.Println("The unsorted string created here is:", unsorted_str)
   chars := strings.Split(unsorted_str, "") //split the string into characters
   sort.Strings(chars) //sort the characters
   fmt.Println("The sorted string formed here is:")
   fmt.Println(strings.Join(chars, "")) //join the characters and print on console
}

Output

The unsorted string created here is: kertgld
The sorted string formed here is:
degklrt

Conclusion

We executed the program of sorting a string using three examples respectively. In the first example we used sort.Slice() function to sort the string, in the second example we converted unsorted string to rune and then applied sort.Slice() function on it and in the third example we used sort.strings and strings.split function where string is splitted and then sorted based on characters. Hence, program executed successfully.