Anatomy of a Rust Program, Part IV: /src/helperror.rs

This blog post is the fourth in a series that describes the structure of the wink command line program that I have written in rust and that I use to invoke other Windows and Linux programs from bash and Windows shells under Windows Subsystem for Linux. This post describes the HelpError struct used to indicate why the wink program should render usage information and exit, defined in the /src/helperror.rs file and hence crate::helperror:HelpError.

• Anatomy of a Rust Program, Part I: Wink cargo.toml – rustapopoulos.com
• /src/helperror.rs: Defines and implements the HelpError struct used to control rendering of usage information for the wink command.

In some cases when the wink program should render usage information and exit, it creates an instance of the HelpError struct to indicate why.

The first line implements features that support formatting debugging messages for the type.

#[derive(Debug)]

The structure contains a single string field for a helpful message and an implementation that includes a new() function for use as a constructor, a fmt() function that formats the value of the struct for debugging purposes, and a description() function that enables use of this type as something like a derivative of std::error::Error.

#[derive(Debug)]
pub struct HelpError {
    pub message: String,
}

impl HelpError {
    pub fn new(msg: String) -> HelpError {
        HelpError { message: msg }
    }
}

impl std::fmt::Display for HelpError {
    fn fmt(&self, f: &mut std::fmt::Formatter) -> std::fmt::Result {
        write!(f, "{}", self.message)
    }
}

impl std::error::Error for HelpError {
    fn description(&self) -> &str {
        &self.message
    }
}

• Anatomy of a Rust Program, Part V: /src/winkconfig.rs – rustapopoulos.com