Handling Errors with Early Returns in Rust

Introduction

In this lab, we explore the concept of early returns as a way to handle errors in Rust. The example code demonstrates how we can use match statements and early returns to handle errors gracefully, making the code easier to read and write. We also discuss the limitations of explicit error handling and introduce the use of the ? operator for cases where we need to unwrap values without risking a panic.

Note: If the lab does not specify a file name, you can use any file name you want. For example, you can use main.rs, compile and run it with rustc main.rs && ./main.

Skills Graph

Early returns

In the previous example, we explicitly handled the errors using combinators. Another way to deal with this case analysis is to use a combination of match statements and early returns.

That is, we can simply stop executing the function and return the error if one occurs. For some, this form of code can be easier to both read and write. Consider this version of the previous example, rewritten using early returns:

use std::num::ParseIntError;

fn multiply(first_number_str: &str, second_number_str: &str) -> Result<i32, ParseIntError> {
    let first_number = match first_number_str.parse::<i32>() {
        Ok(first_number)  => first_number,
        Err(e) => return Err(e),
    };

    let second_number = match second_number_str.parse::<i32>() {
        Ok(second_number)  => second_number,
        Err(e) => return Err(e),
    };

    Ok(first_number * second_number)
}

fn print(result: Result<i32, ParseIntError>) {
    match result {
        Ok(n)  => println!("n is {}", n),
        Err(e) => println!("Error: {}", e),
    }
}

fn main() {
    print(multiply("10", "2"));
    print(multiply("t", "2"));
}

At this point, we've learned to explicitly handle errors using combinators and early returns. While we generally want to avoid panicking, explicitly handling all of our errors is cumbersome.

In the next section, we'll introduce ? for the cases where we simply need to unwrap without possibly inducing panic.

Summary

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