Compare Two Slices of Bytes in Golang

In Go, comparing two slices of bytes involves checking if each element in both slices is equal. This can be done using a loop or the built-in bytes.Equal() function. In this article, we'll explore both methods and see how to compare two slices of bytes in Go.

Using a Loop

To compare two slices of bytes using a loop, we can iterate over each element in both slices and check if they are equal. Here is an example ?

Example

package main

import (
   "fmt"
)

func main() {
   slice1 := []byte{0x01, 0x02, 0x03}
   slice2 := []byte{0x01, 0x02, 0x03}

   if len(slice1) != len(slice2) {
      fmt.Println("slices are not equal")
      return
   }

   for i := range slice1 {
      if slice1[i] != slice2[i] {
         fmt.Println("slices are not equal")
         return
      }
   }
   fmt.Println("slices are equal")
}

Output

slices are equal

In this example, we create two slices of bytes slice1 and slice2 with the same values. We first check if the lengths of both slices are equal. If the lengths are not equal, the slices are not equal, and we can exit the loop. If the lengths are equal, we iterate over each element in the slices and check if they are equal. If we find any element that is not equal, we can exit the loop and conclude that the slices are not equal. If we reach the end of the loop, we can conclude that the slices are equal.

Using the bytes.Equal() Function

Go provides a built-in function bytes.Equal() to compare two slices of bytes. The bytes.Equal() function takes two slices of bytes and returns true if the slices are equal, false otherwise. Here is an example ?

Example

package main

import (
   "bytes"
   "fmt"
)

func main() {
   slice1 := []byte{0x01, 0x02, 0x03}
   slice2 := []byte{0x01, 0x02, 0x03}

   if bytes.Equal(slice1, slice2) {
      fmt.Println("slices are equal")
   } else {
      fmt.Println("slices are not equal")
   }
}

Output

slices are equal

In this example, we create two slices of bytes slice1 and slice2 with the same values. We use the bytes.Equal() function to compare both slices. If the function returns true, we conclude that the slices are equal. If the function returns false, we conclude that the slices are not equal.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored two methods to compare two slices of bytes in Go. We can use a loop to iterate over each element in the slices and check if they are equal, or we can use the bytes.Equal() function to compare both slices directly. Both methods are straightforward and easy to understand, but the bytes.Equal() function is more concise and less error-prone.