CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rust
ccleve
ccleve

Reputation: 15809

A slice over slices?

I'm trying to use a third-party library in Rust that accepts only &[u8] as input. The actual input I'd like to supply exists as a bunch of separate arrays of u8.

Is it possible to create something that looks like a &[u8] but actually fetches the data from my underlying &[u8]s?

I'm new to Rust and may be having some conceptual difficulties, but this looks like an interface to me (https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.slice.html), and in other languages I can implement interfaces using arbitrary code. Can I do it in this case?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 807

Answers (1)

Ry-
Ry-

Reputation: 225105

A slice type [T] for some T is a concrete type, not an interface/trait, and a slice has to be a contiguous region of memory. You can concatenate slices into some container by copying their contents:

let a: &[u8] = &[1, 2, 3];
let b: &[u8] = &[4, 5];

foo(&[a, b].concat())

If you can’t do that, barring memory mapping hacks (not accessible to safe Rust), the library would need to be changed to accept something more general.

Upvotes: 5

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