Golang: How to convert String to binary representation

Question

In golang, how can I convert a string to binary string? Example: 'CC' becomes 10000111000011

Answer 1

This is a simple way to do it:

func stringToBin(s string) (binString string) {
    for _, c := range s {
        binString = fmt.Sprintf("%s%b",binString, c)
    }
    return 
}

As I included in a comment to another answer you can also use the variant "%s%.8b" which will pad the string with leading zeros if you need or want to represent 8 bits... this will however not make any difference if your character requires greater than 8 bit to represent, such as Greek characters:

Φ 1110100110

λ 1110111011

μ 1110111100

Or these mathematical symbols print 14 bits:

≠ 10001001100000

⊂ 10001010000010

⋅ 10001011000101

So caveat emptor: the example herein is meant as a simple demonstration that fulfills the criteria in the original post, not a robust means for working with base2 representations of Unicode codepoints.

Answer 2

First, the binary representation of "CC" is "0100001101000011", you have to take care of leading 0, else your string can be obtained in many different ways.

func binary(s string) string {
    res := ""
    for _, c := range s {
        res = fmt.Sprintf("%s%.8b", res, c)
    }
    return res
}

This produces the desired output: `binary("CC") = "0100001101000011".

Answer 3

Another approach

func strToBinary(s string, base int) []byte {

    var b []byte

    for _, c := range s {
        b = strconv.AppendInt(b, int64(c), base)
    }

    return b
}