Hi! I’m trying to learn Rust, as a little project, I’m trying to build a web scraper that will scrape some content and rebuild it with a static site generator, or using it for making POST requests.

I’m still at a very early stage and I still don’t know much, the simplest error handling strategy I know is using match with Result.

To my eyes, this syntax looks correct, but also looks kind of a lot of lines for a simple http request.

I know the reqwest docs suggest to handle errors with the ? operator, which I don’t know yet, therefore I’m just using what I know now.

fn get_document(permalink: String) -> Html {
        let html_content_result = reqwest::blocking::get(&permalink);
        let html_content = match html_content_result {
            Ok(response) => response,
            Err(error) => panic!("There was an error making the request: {:?}", error),
        };

        let html_content_text_result = html_content.text();
        let html_content_text = match html_content_text_result {
            Ok(text) => text,
            Err(error) =>
                panic!(
                    "There was an error getting the html text from the content of response: :{:?}",
                    error
                ),
        };

        let document = Html::parse_document(&html_content_text);

        document
    }

As for my understanding, this is what I’m doing here: I’m making an http request, if i get a Response, I try to get the text out of the response body, otherwise I handle the error by panicking with a custom message. Getting the text out of the request body is another passage that requires error handling, therefore I use the match expression again to get the text out and handle the possible error (In what circumstances can extracting the text of a response body fail?).

Then I can finally parse the document and return it!

I wonder if it is a correct and understandable way of doing what I’ve in mind.

Do you think this would be a suitable project for someone who is at chapter 7 of the Rust book? I feel like i actually need to build somethiong before keep going with the theory!

  • explore_broaden
    2·
    27 days ago

    You can use expect on Options and Results to extract the value and panic on Error in the same line (https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/result/enum.Result.html#method.expect).

    let html_content = reqwest::blocking::get(&permalink).expect("the request should succeed");

    You can also use unwrap if you don’t need a custom message. The ? operator is definitely the most compact way of handling errors, and for good reason because the rust developers want people to use it. Once you learn that the code will become somewhat smaller.