Go - Comparing strings/byte slices input by the user

I am getting input from the user, however when I try to compare it later on to a string literal it does not work. That is just a test though.

I would like to set it up so that when a blank line is entered (just hitting the enter/return key) the program exits. I don't understand why the strings are not comparing because when I print it, it comes out identical.

in := bufio.NewReader(os.Stdin); 
input, err := in.ReadBytes('\n');

if err != nil {
    fmt.Println("Error: ", err)
}
  
if string(input) == "example" {
    os.Exit(0)
}

string vs []byte

string definition:

> string is the set of all strings of 8-bit bytes, conventionally but not necessarily representing UTF-8-encoded text. A string may be empty, but not nil. Values of string type are immutable.

byte definition:

> byte is an alias for uint8 and is equivalent to uint8 in all ways. It is used, by convention, to distinguish byte values from 8-bit unsigned integer values.

What does it mean?

• []byte is a byte slice. slice can be empty.
• string elements are unicode characters, which can have more then 1 byte.
• string elements keep a meaning of data (encoding), []bytes not.
• equality operator is defined for string type but not for slice type.

As you see they are two different types with different properties.
There is a great blog post explaining different string related types [1]

Regards the issue you have in your code snippet.

Bear in mind that in.ReadBytes(char) returns a byte slice with char inclusively. So in your code input ends with '\n'. If you want your code to work in desired way then try this:

if string(input) == "example\n" { // or "example\r\n" when on windows
    os.Exit(0)
}

Also make sure that your terminal code page is the same as your .go source file. Be aware about different end-line styles (Windows uses "\r\n"), Standard go compiler uses utf8 internally.

[1] Comparison of Go data types for string processing.