Creating a string from Vec<char> [duplicate] - string

Question

This question already has answers here:
How to convert Vec<char> to a string
(2 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
I've got a Vec<char> that I need to turn into a &str or String, but I'm unsure of the best way to do this. I've looked around and every resource I've found seems to be out-dated in some way. The answers in this question don't seem to be applicable for the newest build.
I'm using the nightly for 2015-3-19

Answer 1

The iterator based approach with .collect should work, after updating for language changes:
char_vector.iter().cloned().collect::<String>();
(I've chosen to replace .map(|c| *c) with .cloned() but either works.)

Answer 2

If your vector can be consumed, you can also use into_iter to avoid the clone
fn main() {
let char_vector = vec!['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'];
let str: String = char_vector.into_iter().collect();
println!("{}", str);
}

Answer 3

You can convert the Vec into a String without doing any allocations. It requires quite some unsafe code though:
#![feature(raw, unicode)]
use std::raw::Repr;
use std::slice::from_raw_parts_mut;
fn inplace_to_string(v: Vec<char>) -> String {
unsafe {
let mut i = 0;
{
let ch_v = &v[..];
let r = ch_v.repr();
let p: &mut [u8] = from_raw_parts_mut(r.data as *mut u8, r.len*4);
for ch in ch_v {
i += ch.encode_utf8(&mut p[i..i+4]).unwrap();
}
}
let p = v.as_ptr();
let cap = v.capacity()*4;
std::mem::forget(v);
let v = Vec::from_raw_parts(p as *mut u8, i, cap);
String::from_utf8_unchecked(v)
}
}
fn main() {
let char_vector = vec!['h', 'ä', 'l', 'l', 'ö'];
let str: String = char_vector.iter().cloned().collect();
let str2 = inplace_to_string(char_vector);
println!("{}", str);
println!("{}", str2);
}
PlayPen
Detailed Explanation
This creates a mutable u8 slice and a char slice simultaneously to the same buffer (breaking all Rust guarantees). Note that the u8 slice is four times as large as the char slice, since char always takes up 4 bytes.
let ch_v = &v[..];
let r = ch_v.repr();
let v: &mut [u8] = from_raw_parts_mut(r.data as *mut u8, r.len*4);
We need that to iterate over the unicode chars and replace them by their utf8 encoded counterpart. Since utf8 is always shorter or the same length as unicode, we can guarantee that we never overwrite any part we haven't read yet.
for ch in ch_v {
i += ch.encode_utf8(&mut v[i..i+4]).unwrap();
}
Since a char is always unicode and our buffer is always exactly 4 bytes (which is the maximum number of bytes a utf8 encoded unicode char will need), we can encode our chars to utf8 without checking if it worked (it will always work). The encode_utf8 function returns the length of the utf8 representation. Our index i is the location of the last written utf8 char.
Finally we need to do some cleaning up. Our vector is still of type Vec<char>. We get all the info we need (Pointer to the heap allocated array and the capacity)
let p = v.as_ptr();
let cap = v.capacity()*4;
Then we release the previous vector from all obligations like freeing memory.
std::mem::forget(v);
and finally recreate the u8 vector with correct length and capacity, and directly turn it into a String. The conversion to String does not need to be checked, as we already know the utf8 is correct, since the original Vec<char> could only contain correct unicode chars.
let v = Vec::from_raw_parts(p as *mut u8, i, cap);
String::from_utf8_unchecked(v)