As I said in the previous post that I have started learning Rust and made a simple fibonacci series generator. Today I made a palindrome string checker. it's very basic. I haven't used Enum or Struct in the code since I don't think it's necessary in this simple code.

here is the code:

use std::io;

fn main() {
    let mut input = String::new();
    let stdin = io::stdin();
    stdin.read_line(&mut input).unwrap(); // we want to exit in case it couldn't read from stdin

    input = input.replace("\n", ""); // Removing newline

    let mut is_palindrome: bool = true;
    for i in 0..input.len()/2 {
        let first_char: &str = &input[i..i+1];
        let last_char: &str = &input[input.len()-i-1..input.len()-i];
        if first_char != "\n" {
            if first_char != last_char {
                is_palindrome = false;
            }
        }
    }

    println!("palindrome: {}", is_palindrome);
}

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

There is a much nicer way of checking.

Rust iterators are really powerful. Try using them instead of loops, whenever you can.

Tap for solution

let is_palindrome = input.chars().eq(input.chars().rev());

As you can see, the intent is much clearer instead of indexing into the loops. Technically this does however twice as many comparisons. They can be avoided with take and half the size of the iterator.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

let is_palindrome = input.chars().eq(input.chars().rev());

wow, this is really awesome. you just made a single liner for this whole problem. I didn't know that you could do something like this since I don't know much about Rust yet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

There's so many useful methods for iterators its worth reading the doc page to familiarize yourself. Its wicked powerful: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html

[–] FizzyOrange 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

You only need to check half of the string, so I think a technically optimal solution would have some take_while and maybe char_indices in there...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

That's exactly what I Hinted at in my post, though I would use take(input.size()/2). However I wouldn't be surprised if the compiler could short circuit it, but I haven't checked.

[–] FizzyOrange 6 points 15 hours ago

Oh yeah I can't read 😄

I would be extremely surprised if any compiler was smart enough to short circuit that.

I would be a little less surprised if checking the whole string was actually faster anyway though... but I would still bet against it.