Steve Klabnik 0c30e1faad Include Strings guide with the others.

Three small changes:

1. Re-organize headers in the Strings guide so they show up correctly.
2. build the strings guide with the other docs
3. include the strings guide in the list of guides

2014-07-18 10:48:24 -04:00

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% The Strings Guide

Strings are an important concept to master in any programming language. If you come from a managed language background, you may be surprised at the complexity of string handling in a systems programming language. Efficient access and allocation of memory for a dynamically sized structure involves a lot of details. Luckily, Rust has lots of tools to help us here.

A string is a sequence of unicode scalar values encoded as a stream of UTF-8 bytes. All strings are guaranteed to be validly-encoded UTF-8 sequences. Additionally, strings are not null-terminated and can contain null bytes.

Rust has two main types of strings: &str and String.

&str

The first kind is a &str. This is pronounced a 'string slice.' String literals are of the type &str:

let string = "Hello there.";

Like any Rust type, string slices have an associated lifetime. A string literal is a &'static str. A string slice can be written without an explicit lifetime in many cases, such as in function arguments. In these cases the lifetime will be inferred:

fn takes_slice(slice: &str) {
    println!("Got: {}", slice);
}

Like vector slices, string slices are simply a pointer plus a length. This means that they're a 'view' into an already-allocated string, such as a &'static str or a String.

String

A String is a heap-allocated string. This string is growable, and is also guaranteed to be UTF-8.

let mut s = "Hello".to_string();
println!("{}", s);

s.push_str(", world.");
println!("{}", s);

You can coerce a String into a &str with the as_slice() method:

fn takes_slice(slice: &str) {
    println!("Got: {}", slice);
}

fn main() {
    let s = "Hello".to_string();
    takes_slice(s.as_slice());
}

You can also get a &str from a stack-allocated array of bytes:

use std::str;

let x: &[u8] = &[b'a', b'b'];
let stack_str: &str = str::from_utf8(x).unwrap();

Best Practices

`String` vs. `&str`

In general, you should prefer String when you need ownership, and &str when you just need to borrow a string. This is very similar to using Vec<T> vs. &[T], and T vs &T in general.

This means starting off with this:

fn foo(s: &str) {

and only moving to this:

fn foo(s: String) {

If you have good reason. It's not polite to hold on to ownership you don't need, and it can make your lifetimes more complex. Furthermore, you can pass either kind of string into foo by using .as_slice() on any String you need to pass in, so the &str version is more flexible.

Comparisons

To compare a String to a constant string, prefer as_slice()...

fn compare(string: String) {
    if string.as_slice() == "Hello" {
        println!("yes");
    }
}

... over to_string():

fn compare(string: String) {
    if string == "Hello".to_string() {
        println!("yes");
    }
}

Converting a String to a &str is cheap, but converting the &str to a String involves an allocation.

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