Format Strings in Rust 1.58

14th Jan 2022

Rust 1.58.0 Release Notes

std::fmt Documentation

The Rust 1.58.0 update brought a nice addition that will be familiar to dynamic language users.

It allows you to put variables from the outside scope directly into format string curly braces:

// In all examples below x = "world"
let x = "world";
println!("Hello {x}!");

Hello world!

You can also use format specifiers within the curly braces.

For example with debug output:

let items = vec![10, 20, 30];
println!("{items:?}")

[10, 20, 30]

Or pretty print the output:

println!("{items:#?}")

[
    10,
    20,
    30,
]

If you haven't seen it before, you can set the minimum width of how items are printed to give uniform spacing with :[width]. Example to print a table with even spacing:

let items = ["these", "words", "are", "different", "sizes"];
let column1 = "item";
let column2 = "iter";
println!("{column1:10}| {column2}");
println!("----------------");
for (i, item) in items.iter().enumerate() {
    println!("{item:10}: {i}");
}

item      | iter
----------------
these     : 0
words     : 1
are       : 2
different : 3
sizes     : 4

Align items to the centre:

println!("----------------");
for (i, item) in items.iter().enumerate() {
    println!("{item:^10}: {i}");
}

----------------
  these   : 0
  words   : 1
   are    : 2
different : 3
  sizes   : 4

Align items to right

println!("----------------");
for (i, item) in items.iter().enumerate() {
    println!("{item:>10}: {i}");
}

----------------
     these: 0
     words: 1
       are: 2
 different: 3
     sizes: 4

Set width 7 characters wide leaving 2 spaces after world:

println!("hello {x:7}!");

hello world  !

Use an existing i32 variable to do the same thing, just put a $ after the variable name

let spaces = 7;
println!("hello {x:spaces$}!");

hello world  !

Fill in gaps with any character:

println!("right aligned: hello{x:->7}!");
println!("left aligned: hello{x:-<7}!");
println!("center aligned: hello{x:-^7}!");

right aligned: hello--world!
left aligned: helloworld--!
center aligned: hello-world-!

Always print the sign of a numeric type even if positive:

let y = 10;
println!("{y:+}");

+10

Print to hex, binary or octal:

println!("hex: {y:#x}");
println!("binary: {y:#b}");
println!("octal: {y:#o}");

hex: 0xa
binary: 0b1010
octal: 0o12

Set float precision (it rounds to the set precision)

let z = 5.123456;
println!("3 precision: {z:.3}");
println!("5 precision: {z:.5}");

3 precision: 5.123
5 precision: 5.12346

You can use an existing variable to set the precision:

let precision = 3;
println!("3 precision: {z:.precision$}");

3 precision: 5.123

Chain different format specifiers together

(you can edit this cell and run it to experiment)

Remember that Rust doesn't use any localization, so these outputs will always look the same.

Also to escape these curly braces, just put two of them in front of eachother:

println!("Sometimes I need to print {{ or }} too!")

Sometimes I need to print { or } too!

This quality of life improvement is significant, the first thing a programmer does when learning a new language is print output, this brings Rust on par with the most ergonomic of dynamic languages. Compiled languages can have nice things too!

Thanks for reading, if you have suggestions for things to add you can make pull requests on this file:

Github link