How to check if Strings are Equal in Go?

Go – Check if Strings are Equal

To check if strings are equal in Go programming, use equal to operator == and provide the two strings as operands to this operator. If both the strings are equal, equal to operator returns true, otherwise the operator returns false.

We can also use strings.Compare(string, string) function to check if the strings are equal. If the two strings are equal, then strings.Compare() function returns an integer value of 0. We may use this as a condition to check if strings are equal.

Please note that using Equal to Operator is better than compared to strings.Compare() in terms of performance.

In this tutorial, we go through examples for each of the above methods.

Examples

In the following program, we take two string values in str1 and str2. We check if these two strings are equal using equal to operator.

example.go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	str1 := "Abc"
	str2 := "Abc"
	result := str1 == str2
	fmt.Println("Are the two strings equal: ", result)
}

Output

Are the two strings equal:  true

Since equal to operator returns a boolean value, we can use the expression str1 == str2 as a condition for if statement.

example.go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	str1 := "Abc"
	str2 := "Abc"
	if str1 == str2 {
		fmt.Println("The two strings are equal.")
	} else {
		fmt.Println("The two strings are not equal.")
	}
}

Output

The two strings are equal.

Now, let us use strings.Compare(string, string) function, to check if strings are equal.

example.go

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"strings"
)

func main() {
	str1 := "Abc"
	str2 := "Abc"
	if strings.Compare(str1, str2) == 0 {
		fmt.Println("The two strings are equal.")
	} else {
		fmt.Println("The two strings are not equal.")
	}
}

Output

The two strings are equal.

Conclusion

In this Golang Tutorial, we learned how to check if two strings are equal, with the help of example programs.