18PATTERNS AND MATCHING
Patterns are a special syntax in Rust for matching against the structure of types, both complex and simple. Using patterns in conjunction with match expressions and other constructs gives you more control over a program’s control flow. A pattern consists of some combination of the following:
- Literals
- Destructured arrays, enums, structs, or tuples
- Variables
- Wildcards
- Placeholders
These components describe the shape of the data we’re working with, which we then match against values to determine whether our program has the correct data to continue running a particular piece of code.
To use a pattern, we compare it to some ...
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