patterns/idioms/coercion-arguments.html
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<ol class="chapter"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../intro.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">1.</strong> Introduction</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../translations.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">1.1.</strong> Translations</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.</strong> Idioms</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/coercion-arguments.html" class="active"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.1.</strong> Use borrowed types for arguments</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/concat-format.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.2.</strong> Concatenating Strings with format!</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/ctor.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.3.</strong> Constructor</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/default.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.4.</strong> The Default Trait</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/deref.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.5.</strong> Collections Are Smart Pointers</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/dtor-finally.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.6.</strong> Finalisation in Destructors</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/mem-replace.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.7.</strong> mem::{take(_), replace(_)}</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/on-stack-dyn-dispatch.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.8.</strong> On-Stack Dynamic Dispatch</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/ffi/intro.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.9.</strong> Foreign function interface (FFI)</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/ffi/errors.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.9.1.</strong> Idiomatic Errors</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/ffi/accepting-strings.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.9.2.</strong> Accepting Strings</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/ffi/passing-strings.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.9.3.</strong> Passing Strings</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/option-iter.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.10.</strong> Iterating over an Option</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/pass-var-to-closure.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.11.</strong> Pass Variables to Closure</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/priv-extend.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.12.</strong> Privacy For Extensibility</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/rustdoc-init.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.13.</strong> Easy doc initialization</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/temporary-mutability.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.14.</strong> Temporary mutability</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../idioms/return-consumed-arg-on-error.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">2.15.</strong> Return consumed arg on error</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.</strong> Design Patterns</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/behavioural/intro.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.1.</strong> Behavioural</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/behavioural/command.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.1.1.</strong> Command</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/behavioural/interpreter.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.1.2.</strong> Interpreter</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/behavioural/newtype.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.1.3.</strong> Newtype</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/behavioural/RAII.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.1.4.</strong> RAII Guards</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/behavioural/strategy.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.1.5.</strong> Strategy</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/behavioural/visitor.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.1.6.</strong> Visitor</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/creational/intro.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.2.</strong> Creational</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/creational/builder.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.2.1.</strong> Builder</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/creational/fold.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.2.2.</strong> Fold</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/structural/intro.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.3.</strong> Structural</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/structural/compose-structs.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.3.1.</strong> Compose Structs</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/structural/small-crates.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.3.2.</strong> Prefer Small Crates</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/structural/unsafe-mods.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.3.3.</strong> Contain unsafety in small modules</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/ffi/intro.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.4.</strong> Foreign function interface (FFI)</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/ffi/export.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.4.1.</strong> Object-Based APIs</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../patterns/ffi/wrappers.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">3.4.2.</strong> Type Consolidation into Wrappers</a></li></ol></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../anti_patterns/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.</strong> Anti-patterns</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../anti_patterns/borrow_clone.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.1.</strong> Clone to satisfy the borrow checker</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../anti_patterns/deny-warnings.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.2.</strong> #[deny(warnings)]</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../anti_patterns/deref.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">4.3.</strong> Deref Polymorphism</a></li></ol></li><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../functional/index.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.</strong> Functional Programming</a></li><li><ol class="section"><li class="chapter-item expanded "><a href="../functional/paradigms.html"><strong aria-hidden="true">5.1.</strong> Programming paradigms</a></li><li class="chapter-item expanded 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<h1 id="use-borrowed-types-for-arguments"><a class="header" href="#use-borrowed-types-for-arguments">Use borrowed types for arguments</a></h1>
<h2 id="description"><a class="header" href="#description">Description</a></h2>
<p>Using a target of a deref coercion can increase the flexibility of your code
when you are deciding which argument type to use for a function argument.
In this way, the function will accept more input types.</p>
<p>This is not limited to slice-able or fat pointer types.
In fact, you should always prefer using the <strong>borrowed type</strong> over
<strong>borrowing the owned type</strong>.
Such as <code>&amp;str</code> over <code>&amp;String</code>, <code>&amp;[T]</code> over <code>&amp;Vec&lt;T&gt;</code>, or <code>&amp;T</code> over <code>&amp;Box&lt;T&gt;</code>.</p>
<p>Using borrowed types you can avoid layers of indirection for those instances
where the owned type already provides a layer of indirection. For instance, a
<code>String</code> has a layer of indirection, so a <code>&amp;String</code> will have two layers of
indirection. We can avoid this by using <code>&amp;str</code> instead, and letting <code>&amp;String</code>
coerce to a <code>&amp;str</code> whenever the function is invoked.</p>
<h2 id="example"><a class="header" href="#example">Example</a></h2>
<p>For this example, we will illustrate some differences for using <code>&amp;String</code> as a
function argument versus using a <code>&amp;str</code>, but the ideas apply as well to using
<code>&amp;Vec&lt;T&gt;</code> versus using a <code>&amp;[T]</code> or using a <code>&amp;Box&lt;T&gt;</code> versus a <code>&amp;T</code>.</p>
<p>Consider an example where we wish to determine if a word contains three
consecutive vowels. We don't need to own the string to determine this, so we
will take a reference.</p>
<p>The code might look something like this:</p>
<pre><pre class="playground"><code class="language-rust edition2018">fn three_vowels(word: &amp;String) -&gt; bool {
let mut vowel_count = 0;
for c in word.chars() {
match c {
'a' | 'e' | 'i' | 'o' | 'u' =&gt; {
vowel_count += 1;
if vowel_count &gt;= 3 {
return true
}
}
_ =&gt; vowel_count = 0
}
}
false
}
fn main() {
let ferris = &quot;Ferris&quot;.to_string();
let curious = &quot;Curious&quot;.to_string();
println!(&quot;{}: {}&quot;, ferris, three_vowels(&amp;ferris));
println!(&quot;{}: {}&quot;, curious, three_vowels(&amp;curious));
// This works fine, but the following two lines would fail:
// println!(&quot;Ferris: {}&quot;, three_vowels(&quot;Ferris&quot;));
// println!(&quot;Curious: {}&quot;, three_vowels(&quot;Curious&quot;));
}</code></pre></pre>
<p>This works fine because we are passing a <code>&amp;String</code> type as a parameter.
If we remove the comments on the last two lines, the example will fail. This
is because a <code>&amp;str</code> type will not coerce to a <code>&amp;String</code> type. We can fix this
by simply modifying the type for our argument.</p>
<p>For instance, if we change our function declaration to:</p>
<pre><code class="language-rust ignore">fn three_vowels(word: &amp;str) -&gt; bool {</code></pre>
<p>then both versions will compile and print the same output.</p>
<pre><code class="language-bash">Ferris: false
Curious: true
</code></pre>
<p>But wait, that's not all! There is more to this story.
It's likely that you may say to yourself: that doesn't matter, I will never be
using a <code>&amp;'static str</code> as an input anyways (as we did when we used <code>&quot;Ferris&quot;</code>).
Even ignoring this special example, you may still find that using <code>&amp;str</code> will
give you more flexibility than using a <code>&amp;String</code>.</p>
<p>Let's now take an example where someone gives us a sentence, and we want to
determine if any of the words in the sentence contain three consecutive vowels.
We probably should make use of the function we have already defined and simply
feed in each word from the sentence.</p>
<p>An example of this could look like this:</p>
<pre><pre class="playground"><code class="language-rust edition2018">fn three_vowels(word: &amp;str) -&gt; bool {
let mut vowel_count = 0;
for c in word.chars() {
match c {
'a' | 'e' | 'i' | 'o' | 'u' =&gt; {
vowel_count += 1;
if vowel_count &gt;= 3 {
return true
}
}
_ =&gt; vowel_count = 0
}
}
false
}
fn main() {
let sentence_string =
&quot;Once upon a time, there was a friendly curious crab named Ferris&quot;.to_string();
for word in sentence_string.split(' ') {
if three_vowels(word) {
println!(&quot;{} has three consecutive vowels!&quot;, word);
}
}
}</code></pre></pre>
<p>Running this example using our function declared with an argument type <code>&amp;str</code>
will yield</p>
<pre><code class="language-bash">curious has three consecutive vowels!
</code></pre>
<p>However, this example will not run when our function is declared with an
argument type <code>&amp;String</code>. This is because string slices are a <code>&amp;str</code> and not a
<code>&amp;String</code> which would require an allocation to be converted to <code>&amp;String</code> which
is not implicit, whereas converting from <code>String</code> to <code>&amp;str</code> is cheap and implicit.</p>
<h2 id="see-also"><a class="header" href="#see-also">See also</a></h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/type-coercions.html">Rust Language Reference on Type Coercions</a></li>
<li>For more discussion on how to handle <code>String</code> and <code>&amp;str</code> see
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201112023149/https://hermanradtke.com/2015/05/03/string-vs-str-in-rust-functions.html">this blog series (2015)</a>
by Herman J. Radtke III</li>
</ul>
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