Unwrapping
It’s a cardinal sin in Rust to .unwrap a Result or an Option. You should be using things like if let Some(var) or if let Ok(var) instead, or match if you’re explicitly handling the Err. Otherwise .unwrap is just gonna potentially cause you at runtime errors that are hard to debug.
When you unwrap a value in Rust what you’re doing is taking out the underlying value out of some container. For example, a Result can hold either an Err or an Ok, so unwrapping gets that value out of it. However, some value when unwrapped will cause at runtime panics to be raised, crashing your application.
Yes! if let Some(var) and if let Ok(var) are some of the nicest approaches when you’re not going to be handling a None or Err state explicitly.
Using match is really good when you’re explicitly wanting to handle both the situation where it’s an Ok as well as if it’s an Err in the same location.
The best way of dealing with a Result is by using the ? keyword, which raises the Err to the parent context. This can be used inside any function that returns a Result. This helps keep your code as clean as possible while limiting the number of locations where you have to add explicit error handling.
There are situations where using .unwrap is considered ok to do. For example it can be very neat to use in Iterator type functions where you might’ve first used a .filter to get rid of all Errors, then you know for sure that anything that remains is gonna be Ok, so then it’s ok to .unwrap because you’ve explicitly made sure it can’t raise a panic.
Or if you have surrounding code that produces the Option or Err that you can as a developer 100% guarantee that it won’t fail because the surrounding logic simply can’t cause issues, but then again any developer that’s that certain their code can’t fail is probably not the kind of developer you wanna trust with such a statement. 😅