Ah moment when using slices in Go!

The slices package defines various functions useful with slices of any type. Below are some small examples I came across today. I wanted to see how I could remove a string from a slice. Below I have a slice called names.

names := []string{"Paul", "Fiona", "Murphy", "Linda"}

I wanted to remove the string Linda. In the block below I used two functions from the slice package these were Index and Delete these two allowed me to get the index of the string and delete it by its index.

if idx := slices.Index(names, "Linda"); idx != -1 {
    slices.Delete(names, idx, idx+1)
}

So what is happening here?

slices.Index: takes two arguments, the slice in question names and the item I am searching for.

Index returns the index of the first occurrence of v in s, or -1 if not present.

In the if statement you can see a ; this is used to combine two conditions. Allowing for the statement to read as follows. IF the index of "Linda" does not equal -1 then action the code inside the block. Pretty cool as this is different from Python which I am use to.

Next there is slices.Delete this takes three arguments, the slice, the start index and the end index. This would work in the same manner as a slice would work in Python [1:4] for example. Therefore with the block above, I took the index of the string, for this example lets say it was 3 and I only wanted to delete that index, therefore the end index would be 4.

This is why the arguments are Delete(names, idx, idx+1) which in turn would be Delete(names, 3, 3+1)

Quite simple but was am ah ha moment for me.

More can be found on the slices package here