Rust Essentials - Second Edition

Strings and arrays

Back in the first section of this chapter we saw that the sequence of characters in a string is given by the function chars(). Doesn't this look like an array to you? A string is backed up by an array if we look at the memory allocation of its characters; it is stored as a vector of bytes Vec<u8>.

That means we can also take a slice of type &str from a string:

let location = "Middle-Earth"; 
let part = &location[7..12]; 
println!("{}", part); // Earth 

We can collect the characters of a string slice into a vector and sort them as follows:

let magician = "Merlin"; 
let mut chars: Vec<char> = magician.chars().collect(); 
chars.sort(); 
for c in chars.iter() { 
    print!("{} ", c); 
} 

This prints out the following output:

    M e i l ...