Trait std::convert::From

1.0.0 · source · []
pub trait From<T> {
    fn from(T) -> Self;
}
Expand description

Used to do value-to-value conversions while consuming the input value. It is the reciprocal of Into.

One should always prefer implementing From over Into because implementing From automatically provides one with an implementation of Into thanks to the blanket implementation in the standard library.

Only implement Into when targeting a version prior to Rust 1.41 and converting to a type outside the current crate. From was not able to do these types of conversions in earlier versions because of Rust’s orphaning rules. See Into for more details.

Prefer using Into over using From when specifying trait bounds on a generic function. This way, types that directly implement Into can be used as arguments as well.

The From is also very useful when performing error handling. When constructing a function that is capable of failing, the return type will generally be of the form Result<T, E>. The From trait simplifies error handling by allowing a function to return a single error type that encapsulate multiple error types. See the “Examples” section and the book for more details.

Note: This trait must not fail. If the conversion can fail, use TryFrom.

Generic Implementations

  • From<T> for U implies Into<U> for T
  • From is reflexive, which means that From<T> for T is implemented

Examples

String implements From<&str>:

An explicit conversion from a &str to a String is done as follows:

let string = "hello".to_string();
let other_string = String::from("hello");

assert_eq!(string, other_string);
Run

While performing error handling it is often useful to implement From for your own error type. By converting underlying error types to our own custom error type that encapsulates the underlying error type, we can return a single error type without losing information on the underlying cause. The ‘?’ operator automatically converts the underlying error type to our custom error type by calling Into<CliError>::into which is automatically provided when implementing From. The compiler then infers which implementation of Into should be used.

use std::fs;
use std::io;
use std::num;

enum CliError {
    IoError(io::Error),
    ParseError(num::ParseIntError),
}

impl From<io::Error> for CliError {
    fn from(error: io::Error) -> Self {
        CliError::IoError(error)
    }
}

impl From<num::ParseIntError> for CliError {
    fn from(error: num::ParseIntError) -> Self {
        CliError::ParseError(error)
    }
}

fn open_and_parse_file(file_name: &str) -> Result<i32, CliError> {
    let mut contents = fs::read_to_string(&file_name)?;
    let num: i32 = contents.trim().parse()?;
    Ok(num)
}
Run

Required methods

Performs the conversion.

Implementations on Foreign Types

Implementors

Intended for use for errors not exposed to the user, where allocating onto the heap (for normal construction via Error::new) is too costly.

Maps a byte in 0x00..=0xFF to a char whose code point has the same value, in U+0000..=U+00FF.

Unicode is designed such that this effectively decodes bytes with the character encoding that IANA calls ISO-8859-1. This encoding is compatible with ASCII.

Note that this is different from ISO/IEC 8859-1 a.k.a. ISO 8859-1 (with one less hyphen), which leaves some “blanks”, byte values that are not assigned to any character. ISO-8859-1 (the IANA one) assigns them to the C0 and C1 control codes.

Note that this is also different from Windows-1252 a.k.a. code page 1252, which is a superset ISO/IEC 8859-1 that assigns some (not all!) blanks to punctuation and various Latin characters.

To confuse things further, on the Web ascii, iso-8859-1, and windows-1252 are all aliases for a superset of Windows-1252 that fills the remaining blanks with corresponding C0 and C1 control codes.

Stability note: This impl does not yet exist, but we are “reserving space” to add it in the future. See rust-lang/rust#64715 for details.