Losing std::str::Chars::as_str

help
1

Am I missing something?

The method std::str::Chars::as_str gives you an &str slice of the remainder of the string you're iterating over, which is useful. But many of the iterator methods, e.g., skip_while and especially peekable, return an interator adaptor, e.g., Peekable<Chars>, that does NOT support as_str.

Is there a way to get as_str back in these cases? I've been looking and I've not found one. In particular, I want to be able to use as_str with Peekable<Chars>.

Note: I'm not looking for complex work-arounds here; I can look at character lengths and wrangle slice indices if I have to. What I want to know is whether or not there's a simple efficient solution in the existing API that I'm missing.

2

You are not missing anything. There's no simple way for methods of specific iterators (like Chars::as_str) to work on iterator adaptors, sorry.

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3

You can sorta kinda do it in some cases. But it won't work for the particular case of Peekable that you're interested in.

Basically, the idea is to use &mut Chars (using e.g. by_ref(), or even just &mut iter) so that you can keep the Chars.

fn main() {
    let s = "abacadaeafagah";
    
    // read up to (and including) the 4th 'a'
    let mut chars = s.chars();
    chars.by_ref().filter(|&c| c == 'a').take(4).for_each(|_| {});
    
    // now you can still use the chars to get the remainder
    assert_eq!(chars.as_str(), "eafagah");
}

As I said, this won't do work the way you'd want it to for something like Peekable, because Peekable will have read an extra item from the Chars if you called peek.

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4

I don't see what is wrong with indexing; this is how I use it:

1 Like
5

Everything's wrong when you don't know that it exists. CharIndices is exactly what I'm looking for.

It is a problem with the Rust documentation that I've noticed before. There are so many useful things like s.char_indices that are not useful in my precise circumstances that the ones that might be go unnoticed. Or, too often, I might see one but it isn't obvious that whatever it is is exactly what I need.

Many, many thanks!

1 Like
6

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