Trait TryFrom

pub trait TryFrom<T>: Sized

Simple and safe type conversions that may fail in a controlled way under some circumstances. It is the reciprocal of TryInto.

This is useful when you are doing a type conversion that may trivially succeed but may also need special handling. For example, there is no way to convert an i64 into an i32 using the From trait, because an i64 may contain a value that an i32 cannot represent and so the conversion would lose data. This might be handled by truncating the i64 to an i32 or by simply returning i32::MAX, or by some other method. The From trait is intended for perfect conversions, so the TryFrom trait informs the programmer when a type conversion could go bad and lets them decide how to handle it.

Generic Implementations

Prefer using TryInto over TryFrom when specifying trait bounds on a generic function to ensure that types that only implement TryInto can be used as well.

TryFrom<T> can be implemented as follows:

struct GreaterThanZero(i32);

impl TryFrom<i32> for GreaterThanZero {
    type Error = &'static str;

    fn try_from(value: i32) -> Result<Self, Self::Error> {
        if value <= 0 {
            Err("GreaterThanZero only accepts values greater than zero!")
        } else {
            Ok(GreaterThanZero(value))
        }
    }
}

Examples

As described, i32 implements TryFrom<i64>:

let big_number = 1_000_000_000_000i64;
// Silently truncates `big_number`, requires detecting
// and handling the truncation after the fact.
let smaller_number = big_number as i32;
assert_eq!(smaller_number, -727379968);

// Returns an error because `big_number` is too big to
// fit in an `i32`.
let try_smaller_number = i32::try_from(big_number);
assert!(try_smaller_number.is_err());

// Returns `Ok(3)`.
let try_successful_smaller_number = i32::try_from(3);
assert!(try_successful_smaller_number.is_ok());

Associated Types

type Error;

The type returned in the event of a conversion error.

Required Methods

fn try_from(value: T) -> Result<Self, Self::Error>

Performs the conversion.

Implementors