What’s the de-facto way of reading and writing files in Rust 1.x?

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With Rust being comparatively new, I’ve seen far too many ways of reading and writing files. Many are extremely messy snippets someone came up with for their blog, and 99% of the examples I’ve found (even on Stack Overflow) are from unstable builds that no longer work. Now that Rust is stable, what is a simple, readable, non-panicking snippet for reading or writing files?

This is the closest I’ve gotten to something that works in terms of reading a text file, but it’s still not compiling even though I’m fairly certain I’ve included everything I should have. This is based off of a snippet I found on Google+ of all places, and the only thing I’ve changed is that the old BufferedReader is now just BufReader:

use std::fs::File;
use std::io::BufReader;
use std::path::Path;

fn main() {
    let path = Path::new("./textfile");
    let mut file = BufReader::new(File::open(&path));
    for line in file.lines() {
        println!("{}", line);
    }
}

The compiler complains:

error: the trait bound `std::result::Result<std::fs::File, std::io::Error>: std::io::Read` is not satisfied [--explain E0277]
 --> src/main.rs:7:20
  |>
7 |>     let mut file = BufReader::new(File::open(&path));
  |>                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
note: required by `std::io::BufReader::new`

error: no method named `lines` found for type `std::io::BufReader<std::result::Result<std::fs::File, std::io::Error>>` in the current scope
 --> src/main.rs:8:22
  |>
8 |>     for line in file.lines() {
  |>                      ^^^^^

To sum it up, what I’m looking for is:

  • brevity
  • readability
  • covers all possible errors
  • doesn’t panic

3 Answers
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