title: How to get the number of characters in a string
body: <p>How can I get the number of characters of a string in Go?</p>
  
  <p>For example, if I have a string <code>"hello"</code> the method should return <code>5</code>. I saw that <code>len(str)</code> returns the number of bytes <strong>and not</strong> the number of characters so <code>len("£")</code> returns 2 instead of 1 because £ is encoded with two bytes in UTF-8.</p>