Go Practice Exercises

Binary Search in Go

Find a value in a sorted slice by halving the search range at every step.

Beginner
3 min read
1 runnable example

What you'll learn

low, high and middle
Returning -1 when missing
Why it is fast

Run code →

Search for 23

164

235

386

567

Found at index 5 after three steps.

Halve the range each step

Binary search looks at the middle of a sorted list and throws away the half that cannot contain the target. Each step halves the work, so it is very fast on large lists.

low and high mark the part that is still being searched. The function returns the position of the target, or -1 when the range becomes empty. low + (high-low)/2 finds the middle without overflow.

Key points

The slice must be sorted.
Each step throws away half.
-1 means the value is not there.

Runnable Go example

Run code →

main.go

package main

import "fmt"

func binarySearch(items []int, target int) int {
	low, high := 0, len(items)
	for low < high {
		middle := low + (high-low)/2
		switch {
		case items[middle] == target:
			return middle
		case items[middle] < target:
			low = middle + 1
		default:
			high = middle
		}
	}
	return -1
}

func main() {
	sorted := []int{2, 5, 8, 12, 16, 23, 38, 56}
	fmt.Println(binarySearch(sorted, 23))
	fmt.Println(binarySearch(sorted, 7))
}

Get a Run button for this example Result of running the code

5
-1

Practice

Open the example in the online compiler, change a value or add a line, and predict the output before you run it. Then break the code on purpose and read the compiler's message.

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