Cannot assign string with single quote in golang

Question

I am learning go and when playing with string I noticed that if a string is in single quotes then golang is giving me an error but double quotes are working fine.

func main() {     var a string     a = 'hello' //will give error     a = "hello" //will not give error } 

This is the error I get on my system:

illegal rune literal 

While when I try to do the same on playground I am getting this error:

prog.go:9: missing ' prog.go:9: syntax error: unexpected name, expecting semicolon or newline or } prog.go:9: newline in string prog.go:9: empty character literal or unescaped ' in character literal prog.go:9: missing ' 

I am not able to understand the exact reason behind this as in for example Python, Perl one can declare a string with both single and double quote.

Answer 1

In Go, '⌘' represents a single character (called a Rune), whereas "⌘" represents a string containing the character ⌘.

This is true in many programming languages where the difference between strings and characters is notable, such as C++.

Check out the "Code points, characters, and runes" section in the Go Blog on Strings

Answer 2

Another option, if you are wanting to embed double quotes:

package main  func main() {    s := `west "north" east`    println(s) } 

https://golang.org/ref/spec#raw_string_lit