Destructuring

Let's look at some more destructuring. You can get the values from a struct or enum by using let backwards. We learned that this is destructuring, because you get variables that are not part of a structure. Now you have the values separately. First a simple example:

struct Person { // make a simple struct for a person
    name: String,
    real_name: String,
    height: u8,
    happiness: bool
}

fn main() {
    let papa_doc = Person { // create variable papa_doc
        name: "Papa Doc".to_string(),
        real_name: "Clarence".to_string(),
        height: 170,
        happiness: false
    };

    let Person { // destructure papa_doc
        name: a,
        real_name: b,
        height: c,
        happiness: d
    } = papa_doc;

    println!("They call him {} but his real name is {}. He is {} cm tall and is he happy? {}", a, b, c, d);
}

This prints: They call him Papa Doc but his real name is Clarence. He is 170 cm tall and is he happy? false

You can see that it's backwards. First we say let papa_doc = Person { fields } to create the struct. Then we say let Person { fields } = papa_doc to destructure it.

You don't have to write name: a - you can just write name. But here we write name: a because we want to use a variable with the name a.

Now a bigger example. In this example we have a City struct. We give it a new function to make it. Then we have a process_city_values function to do things with the values. In the function we just create a Vec, but you can imagine that we can do much more after we destructure it.

struct City {
    name: String,
    name_before: String,
    population: u32,
    date_founded: u32,
}

impl City {
    fn new(name: String, name_before: String, population: u32, date_founded: u32) -> Self {
        Self {
            name,
            name_before,
            population,
            date_founded,
        }
    }
}

fn process_city_values(city: &City) {
    let City {
        name,
        name_before,
        population,
        date_founded,
    } = city;
        // now we have the values to use separately
    let two_names = vec![name, name_before];
    println!("The city's two names are {:?}", two_names);
}

fn main() {
    let tallinn = City::new("Tallinn".to_string(), "Reval".to_string(), 426_538, 1219);
    process_city_values(&tallinn);
}

This prints The city's two names are ["Tallinn", "Reval"].