rust recipes

strings

forces the developer to handle the complexity of strings
simple things are more challenging
strings
- stored on the heap
- mutable
string slices
- immutable (with some exceptions)
- stack-allocated and sometimes as a heap reference, and sometime embedded within the code
easily translatable between the two types

characters are not a single character string
- contains much more info
good way of getting a string slice from a string is using the & borrow operator (reference)

byte is the smallest possible way to encode a single character
strings can be 8-bit (1 byte), 16-bit (2 bytes), 24-bit (3 bytes), and 32-bits (4 bytes)

u8 in Rust just represents the BYTES of memory encoding the string and NOT the individual characters
common mistake: take a substring based on a byte index that splits a character results in a panic
chars() for Unicode codepoints and [] for bytes
- mixing these up will result in panics/crashes

strings are stored in Vec<u8> but when the machine reads them it looks at the first byte and checcks if the most significant bit is 0 or 1. If it finds the leading bit to be 0 it knows the that the UTF-8 character is only 1 byte(u8) long and reads it. If it finds a 1 instead, it then realizes that the UTF-8 character is at least 2 bytes and needs to look at the next byte
- it'll read the first 128 ASCII characters fine, but gibberish beyond that