How to write the first part of an array to file

[moon548834]

I create a big size array name , and copy "Ross" to it, and then I want to write the name to file.
What I want is the file only combined with "Ross"
But now the file goes like this:

Ross^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@

I didn't find a way to write only the first several words of the array.
I want an end character like '\0' in C so that only the meaningful words will be written.
Also, I don't know why ^@ appears in the file.

    let mut name: [u8; 100] = unsafe {mem::zeroed()};
    let s = "Ross";
    let mut i = 0;
    while i < s.len() {
        name[i] = s.as_bytes()[i];
        i += 1;
    }
    let mut file = File::create("name.test").expect("failed to open file");
    file.write_all(&name).expect("failed to write file");
    println!("name:{}", s);

[NobbZ]

How do you look into the file? ^@ is used by some editors to display a byte with value zero in a text file. Similar how ^M is used to display \r-bytes by vi.

If you have vi installed, you can use xxd to actually see a hex dump of your file (Some linux distributions have it in an extra vi-common package though).

[jer]

Rust doesn't use \0 to terminate strings. It stores the length of strings to make that unnecessary.

If all you want to do is write the string, just convert it to a byte slice and write that:

let s = "Ross";
let mut file = File::create("name.test").expect("failed to open file");
file.write_all(s.as_bytes()).expect("failed to write file");

If you have an array (and I would suggest not using mem::zeroed() to initialize it to begin with), you can write a subset of it by slicing it:

let mut file = File::create("name.test").expect("failed to open file");
file.write_all(&name[0..4]).expect("failed to write file");

Again, it's your own responsibility to determine the length, it's not determined by null characters.

[kurdy]

Hi,
My proposition:

let mut name: Vec = Vec::new();
let s = b"Ross";
name.extend_from_slice(s);
let mut file = File::create("name.test").expect("failed to open file");
file.write_all(&name).expect("failed to write file");

The use of Vec doesn't cost a lot for performance the code is I think more concise

Note to initialize an array the code can be:

let mut name : [u8;100] = [0u8;100];

[H2CO3]

Why the temporary Vec though? You could just write file.write_all(s.as_ref()) directly…

[kurdy]

Yes you are right, but I started from snippets proposed in the first post

[moon548834]

got it, thanks

[moon548834]

slicing works