How to reverse a string in Go?

Question

How can we reverse a simple string in Go?

Answer 1

I wrote the following Reverse function which respects UTF8 encoding and combined characters:

// Reverse reverses the input while respecting UTF8 encoding and combined characters
func Reverse(text string) string {
    textRunes := []rune(text)
    textRunesLength := len(textRunes)
    if textRunesLength <= 1 {
        return text
    }

    i, j := 0, 0
    for i < textRunesLength && j < textRunesLength {
        j = i + 1
        for j < textRunesLength && isMark(textRunes[j]) {
            j++
        }

        if isMark(textRunes[j-1]) {
            // Reverses Combined Characters
            reverse(textRunes[i:j], j-i)
        } 

        i = j
    }

    // Reverses the entire array
    reverse(textRunes, textRunesLength)

    return string(textRunes)
}

func reverse(runes []rune, length int) {
    for i, j := 0, length-1; i < length/2; i, j = i+1, j-1 {
        runes[i], runes[j] = runes[j], runes[i]
    }
}

// isMark determines whether the rune is a marker
func isMark(r rune) bool {
    return unicode.Is(unicode.Mn, r) || unicode.Is(unicode.Me, r) || unicode.Is(unicode.Mc, r)
}

I did my best to make it as efficient and readable as possible. The idea is simple, traverse through the runes looking for combined characters then reverse the combined characters' runes in-place. Once we have covered them all, reverse the runes of the entire string also in-place.

Say we would like to reverse this string bròwn. The ò is represented by two runes, one for the o and one for this unicode \u0301a that represents the "grave".

For simplicity, let's represent the string like this bro'wn. The first thing we do is look for combined characters and reverse them. So now we have the string br'own. Finally, we reverse the entire string and end up with nwo'rb. This is returned to us as nwòrb

You can find it here https://github.com/shomali11/util if you would like to use it.

Here are some test cases to show a couple of different scenarios:

func TestReverse(t *testing.T) {
    assert.Equal(t, Reverse(""), "")
    assert.Equal(t, Reverse("X"), "X")
    assert.Equal(t, Reverse("b\u0301"), "b\u0301")
    assert.Equal(t, Reverse("