Rustlings Topic: Option

in Study Log on Rust, Rustlings

Type Option represents an optional value: every Option is either Some and contains a value, or None, and does not. Option types are very common in Rust code, as they have a number of uses:

  • Initial values
  • Return values for functions that are not defined over their entire input range (partial functions)
  • Return value for otherwise reporting simple errors, where None is returned on error
  • Optional struct fields
  • Struct fields that can be loaned or “taken”
  • Optional function arguments
  • Nullable pointers
  • Swapping things out of difficult situations

You may find solution code for the topic from my repo.

  1. option1.rs
  2. option2.rs
  3. option3.rs

option1.rs

Option & Result is very decent enum feature that Rust provides. Most of the time you will find it is useful to return optional value for any function.

With Option<T>, it may have either Some(T) or None. In this case, function print_number declaration looks like this:

fn print_number(maybe_number: Option<u16>)

It takes maybe_number which is Option<u16>. So we know that we can pass either Some(u16) or None. Let’s fix the code to pass Some(u16) instead of pure u16. (which is unacceptable)

Note that original code uses unwrap() to extract u16 from Option. This is not recommended way to do so as the program will panic if it encounters None from the Option. You have to either use pattern matching or is_some() / is_none() method. I deliberately used them all just to show you the basic usage of them.

/* file: "exercises/option/option1.rs" */
// you can modify anything EXCEPT for this function's sig
fn print_number(maybe_number: Option<u16>) {
    match maybe_number {
        Some(num) => println!("printing: {}", num),
        None => println!("printing: None"),
    }
    if maybe_number.is_some() {
        println!("`maybe_number` is a number!")
    }
    if maybe_number.is_none() {
        println!("`maybe_number` is NOT a number")
    }
}

fn main() {
    print_number(Some(13));
    print_number(Some(99));
    print_number(None);

    let mut numbers: [Option<u16>; 5] = [None; 5];
    for iter in 0..5 {
        let number_to_add: u16 = { ((iter * 1235) + 2) / (4 * 16) };

        numbers[iter as usize] = Some(number_to_add);
    }
}

option2.rs

if let & while let is also a useful Rust feature that is - at least for me - new to me.

/* file: "exercises/option/option2.rs" */
fn main() {
    let optional_word = Some(String::from("rustlings"));
    if let Some(word) = optional_word {
        println!("The word is: {}", word);
    } else {
        println!("The optional word doesn't contain anything");
    }

    let mut optional_integers_vec: Vec<Option<i8>> = Vec::new();
    for x in 1..10 {
        optional_integers_vec.push(Some(x));
    }

    while let Some(Some(integer)) = optional_integers_vec.pop() {
        println!("current value: {}", integer);
    }
}

option3.rs

Please do read ref. By default, match statements consume all they can, which can sometimes be a problem, when you don’t need the value to be moved and owned. Which is the exact case here.

By using the ref keyword, we inform the compiler that we don’t want move to happen. We rather borrow the value(y) for a moment.

/* file: "exercises/option/option3.rs" */
struct Point {
    x: i32,
    y: i32,
}

fn main() {
    let y: Option<Point> = Some(Point { x: 100, y: 200 });

    match y {
        // https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/keyword.ref.html
        Some(ref p) => println!("Co-ordinates are {},{} ", p.x, p.y),
        _ => println!("no match"),
    }
    y; // Fix without deleting this line.
}

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