Rust quickie - matching Strings

In case you find yourself trying to match a String (perhaps as part of an Option or Result), here's a little trick.

As a concrete example, let's say you're working with commandline args and want to do different things if it's there and equal to a special value (like "-"), if it's any other filename, or if it's not there.

match args().nth(1) {
    Some("-")     => println!("Input is stdin"),
    Some(ref x)   => println!("Open file: {}", x),
    None          => println!("Open default file /foo/bar")
}

When you try to compile this, you get:

error: mismatched types:
 expected `collections::string::String`,
    found `&'static str`
(expected struct `collections::string::String`,
    found &-ptr) [E0308]

Bummer! At least on the surface, it looks like we don't have an easy way to use a string constant like "-" in our pattern match when what we're matching against a String.

Luckily, Rust pattern matching has a way to help us. We can approximate the above by using match guards. Match guards allow us to put an additional if expression on the pattern.

match args().nth(1) {
    Some(ref x) if x == "-" => println!("Input is stdin"),
    Some(ref x) => println!("Open file: {}", x),
    None        => println!("Open default file /foo/bar")
}

Match guards give you an extra bit of "juice" to express your logic.