Why does Rust still consider the file to be of type `Result` even after I've handled the error in the main function?

[ChoaibMouhrach]

Why does Rust still consider the file to be of type Result even after I've handled the error in the main function?

use std::{fs::File, io};

fn get_file(file_name: &str) -> Result<File, io::Error> {
    let file = File::open(file_name);

    let file_err = match file {
        Ok(file) => return Ok(file),
        Err(err) => err,
    };

    match file_err.kind() {
        io::ErrorKind::NotFound => File::create(file_name),
        _ => Err(file_err),
    }
}

fn main() {
    let file = get_file("random.txt");

    if let Err(err) = file {
        println!("Error: {}", err);
        return;
    }

    //                    Result<File, Error>
    println!("file {:?}", file);
}

[jumpnbrownweasel]

@ChoaibMouhrach

    if let Err(err) = file {
        println!("Error: {}", err);
        return;
    }

You extracted the error from the Result and dealt with it, but you didn't extract the file from the Result. One way to do it is:

    let file = match file {
        Ok(f) = f,
        Err(err) => {
            println!("Error: {}", err);
            return;
        }
    };

    // now `file` is type File

Or perhaps this is better:

    let file = match get_file("random.txt") {
        Ok(f) = f,
        Err(err) => {
            println!("Error: {}", err);
            return;
        }
    };

[paramagnetic]

It looks like you expect Rust to have flow-sensitive typing. It doesn't (and enum variants are not types – enums are sum types, not unions of types).

[kornel]

Rust doesn't do type analysis like TypeScript or new instanceof in Java.

Type of a variable stays the same, even if you checked what is in it.

Result/Err is not special in Rust. It's just an enum, like enum R { A, B, C }, so if you checked that variable == R::A, it wouldn't change it to be R::B.

You need to pattern match on Result::Ok to get the non-error value, or use ? (Try) operator that does this match itself.