How to match a String against string literals in Rust?

Jeroen picture Jeroen · Aug 19, 2014 · Viewed 73.1k times · Source

I'm trying to figure out how to match a String in Rust.

I initially tried matching like this, but I figured out Rust cannot implicitly cast from std::string::String to &str.

fn main() {
    let stringthing = String::from("c");
    match stringthing {
        "a" => println!("0"),
        "b" => println!("1"),
        "c" => println!("2"),
    }
}

This has the error:

error[E0308]: mismatched types
 --> src/main.rs:4:9
  |
4 |         "a" => println!("0"),
  |         ^^^ expected struct `std::string::String`, found reference
  |
  = note: expected type `std::string::String`
             found type `&'static str`

I then tried to construct new String objects, as I could not find a function to cast a String to a &str.

fn main() {
    let stringthing = String::from("c");
    match stringthing {
        String::from("a") => println!("0"),
        String::from("b") => println!("1"),
        String::from("c") => println!("2"),
    }
}

This gave me the following error 3 times:

error[E0164]: `String::from` does not name a tuple variant or a tuple struct
 --> src/main.rs:4:9
  |
4 |         String::from("a") => return 0,
  |         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ not a tuple variant or struct

How to actually match Strings in Rust?

Answer

Tijs Maas picture Tijs Maas · Mar 25, 2015

as_slice is deprecated, you should now use the trait std::convert::AsRef instead:

match stringthing.as_ref() {
    "a" => println!("0"),
    "b" => println!("1"),
    "c" => println!("2"),
    _ => println!("something else!"),
}

Note that you also have to explicitly handle the catch-all case.