Hi! I'm trying to learn Rust, as a little project, I'm trying to build a web scraper that will scrape some content and rebuild it with a static site generator, or using it for making POST requests.

I'm still at a very early stage and I still don't know much, the simplest error handling strategy I know is using match with Result.

To my eyes, this syntax looks correct, but also looks kind of a lot of lines for a simple http request.

I know the reqwest docs suggest to handle errors with the ? operator, which I don't know yet, therefore I'm just using what I know now.

fn get_document(permalink: String) -> Html {
        let html_content_result = reqwest::blocking::get(&permalink);
        let html_content = match html_content_result {
            Ok(response) => response,
            Err(error) => panic!("There was an error making the request: {:?}", error),
        };

        let html_content_text_result = html_content.text();
        let html_content_text = match html_content_text_result {
            Ok(text) => text,
            Err(error) =>
                panic!(
                    "There was an error getting the html text from the content of response: :{:?}",
                    error
                ),
        };

        let document = Html::parse_document(&html_content_text);

        document
    }

As for my understanding, this is what I'm doing here: I'm making an http request, if i get a Response, I try to get the text out of the response body, otherwise I handle the error by panicking with a custom message. Getting the text out of the request body is another passage that requires error handling, therefore I use the match expression again to get the text out and handle the possible error (In what circumstances can extracting the text of a response body fail?).

Then I can finally parse the document and return it!

I wonder if it is a correct and understandable way of doing what I've in mind.

Do you think this would be a suitable project for someone who is at chapter 7 of the Rust book? I feel like i actually need to build somethiong before keep going with the theory!

  • AernaLingus [any]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I'll preface this by saying I'm working my way through the Rust book, too--just a bit further along--so don't take my word as gospel.

    This exact scenario is what the ? operator was designed for: returning early with the Err if one is received[1], otherwise unpacking the Ok. As you've discovered, it's a common pattern, so using the ? operator greatly cuts down on the boilerplate code. If you wanted to do the equivalent of you have here (panicking instead of returning the Err for it to potentially be handled in calling code, albeit without your custom panic messages[2]) you could achieve this with unwrap() instead of ?:

    let html_content_text = reqwest::blocking::get(&permalink).unwrap().text().unwrap();

    Both of these will be covered in chapter 9.

    If you want to avoid those constructs until later, the only thing I'd say is that some of the intermediate variables seem unnecessary since you can match on the function call directly:

    fn get_document(permalink: String) -> Html {
        let html_content = match reqwest::blocking::get(&permalink) {
            Ok(response) => response,
            Err(error) => panic!("There was an error making the request: {:?}", error),
        };

        let html_content_text = match html_content.text() {
            Ok(text) => text,
            Err(error) =>
                panic!(
                    "There was an error getting the html text from the content of response: :{:?}",
                    error
                ),
        };

        let document = Html::parse_document(&html_content_text);

        document
    }

    You could also eliminate the final let statement and just stick the parse_document call at the end, but that's a matter of preference--I know having an intermediate variable before a return can sometimes make debugging easier.

    As for whether you should build something now or wait till you learn more--go with your gut! The most important thing is that you stay actively engaged with the material, and many people find diving into projects as soon as possible helps them learn and stay motivated. You could also use rustlings and/or Rust by Example as you go through the book, which is what I've been doing (specifically rustlings). It's not as stimulating as writing a project from scratch, but it does let you write some relevant code. And if you're not already, I highly recommend using the Brown version of the Rust Book which includes interactive quizzes sprinkled throughout. I've found them particularly helpful for understanding the quirks of the borrow checker, which is a topic it continues to revist throughout the book.

    1. There's also some type coercion, but that's beyond the scope of your question ↩︎

    2. edit: you can use expect to get the custom messages as covered in another comment--not sure how I forgot that ↩︎