In this blog we will look into detail into two print functions in Go – Println() and Printf()

You may be wondering why a blog on this topic, when there are so many interesting topics to learn in Go. The reason for this is that as you will start learning and writing programs in Go, sooner or later you are going to feel the need to print data to console.

You may want to understand how your program is running, what is it’s current state, what values do the variables hold, etc. The easiest way to find is to print output to console (or to any other output stream). Hence the reason for this writing this blog.

This blog is part of the series – Learn Go, in which we will learn about Go language step by step.

Table of Contents

Note: To use both the Print functions given below, you will need to import the fmt package in your code.

1.0 Println()

  • Provided by fmt package
  • Print all the arguments to console output.
  • If more than one argument, then the arguments are separated by a space.
  • Prints a New Line Character at the end.
  • Similar to System.out.println() in Java.


Example 1 : Printing a simple String message

// Will print - Hello World
fmt.Println("Hello World!")


Example 2 : Printing multiple strings

// Will print - Message 1 Message 2 Message 3
fmt.Println("Message 1", "Message 2", "Message 3")


Example 3 : Printing integers

// Will print - 10 15 20 25 35
fmt.Println(10, 15, 20 , 25, 35)


Example 4 : Printing variables of different data types

// Will print - 100 dummy false 11.5
num, str, test, floatNum := 100, "dummy", false, 11.5
fmt.Println(num, str, test, floatNum)

2.0 Printf()

This is also provided by the fmt package in Go, and is used for printing formatted strings to console.

2.1 Why the need for Printf, when we have Println

There are scenarios, where we need print a formatted string to console.
fmt.Println does not provides much help in formatting.

e.g Suppose we have following variable declaration,

num, str, test, floatNum := 100, "dummy", false, 11.5

and we want to print the above variables in this format

Number=100, String=dummy, Boolean=false, Floating=11.50

Now if we use fmt.Println() to print the above message, we may end up writing a statement which looks something like this below.

fmt.Println("Number=", num, "String=", str, "Boolean=", test, "Floating=", floatNum)

But this also does not exactly matches our requirement, as it prints out following

Number= 100 String= dummy Boolean= false Floating= 11.5

Notice the extra spaces that came after the = sign, and the format of floating number is 11.5 instead of 11.50.

fmt.Printf() comes to our rescue and helps us format the strings.

For. e.g. to print the string in the above required format, we can write a simple Printf() statement as below

fmt.Printf("Number=%d, String=%s, Boolean=%t, Floating=%0.2f", num, str, test, floatNum)

2.2 Understanding Printf syntax

Let’s look at the above Printf statement again to understand it

fmt.Printf("Number=%d, String=%s, Boolean=%t, Floating=%0.2f", num, str, test, floatNum)

If you look at the above example, it contains following

  • A string to that is to be printed to console – "Number=%d, String=%s, Boolean=%t, Floating=%0.2f"
  • String contains many placeholder verbs, like %d, %0.2f, etc which are the formatting syntax for actual arguments.
  • After the string are a comma separated list of actual arguments (that will be formatted and replaced in the strings) – num, str, test, floatNum
  • For e.g. the last argument is floatNum whose value is 11.5, and last placeholder verb is %0.2f. So 11.5 is formatted to the format matching the specification of %0.2f, and then replaced in the actual string to be printed.
  • Same happens for each placeholder and arguments.
  • As a result following string gets printed to console
    Number=100, String=dummy, Boolean=false, Floating=11.50

2.3 Printf Formatting verbs

Below are the some of the most commonly using formatting verbs in Printf, along with some examples of how they format a input value to output value

Some example of formatting verbs are

Data Type Format Description Sample Input Sample Output
Integer %d Prints Integer in Base 10 format 234 234
Integer %+d Always prints the Sign of the Integer 234 +234
Integer %5d Prints Integer with width of 5, pads with spaces on the left 234   234
(two spaces followed by 234)
Integer %-5d Prints Integer with width of 5, pads with spaces on the right 234 234
(234 followed by two spaces)
Integer %05d Prints Integer with width of 5, pads with Zeros on the left 234 00234
Integer %b Prints Binary (Base 2) 234 11101010
Integer %o Prints Octal (Base 8) 234 352
Boolean %t Prints true or false true true
Floating Point %f Decimal point, pads 0 to end of decimal, if less than 6 digits, else truncates it 123.465 123.465000
Floating Point  %f -Same as above- 123.1010101010 123.101010
Floating Point %g Necessary digits only. 123.465 123.465
Floating Point %g -Same as above- 123.1010101010 123.101010101
Floating Point %e Prints in Exponential format 123.465 1.234650e+02
Floating Point %0.2f Prints only 2 decimal digits (after rounding up) 123.465 123.47
String %s Prints plain String Sunit Sunit
String %10s Prints atleast 10 characters, adding space to left (if required) Sunit      Sunit
(adds 5 spaces to the start of string)
String %-10s Prints atleast 10 characters, adding space to right (if required) Sunit Sunit
(adds 5 spaces to the end of string)
String %q Prints quoted string Sunit “Sunit”
Integer %T Prints the data type 234 int
Floating Point %T -Same as above- 123.1010101010 float64
String %T -Same as above- Sunit string
Boolean %T -Same as above- true bool

Note: %v, can be used for most common scenarios.
The default format for %v is:
Boolean:              %t
Integers:             %d
Floating Point:   %g
String:                  %s

For more details, please refer to Go fmt documentation

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In the next blog of the Learn Go tutorial series, we will look at Writing your first Go Program