Unable to return a vector of string slices: borrowed value does not live long enough

Question

I'm new to Rust and I'm having some trouble with the borrow checker. I don't understand why this code won't compile. Sorry if this is close to a previously answered question but I can't seem to find a solution in the other questions I've looked at.

I understand the similarity to Return local String as a slice (&str) but in that case it is just one string being returned and not enough for me to reason with my code in which I am trying to return a vector. From what I understand, I am trying to return references to str types that will go out of scope at the end of the function block and so should I be mapping that vector of &str into a vector of String? I am not so concerned about the performance effects of converting &str to String. First I'd just like to get it working.

This is the code, the error is in the lex function.

use std::io::prelude::*;
use std::fs::File;
use std::env;

fn open(mut s: &mut String, filename: &String) {
    let mut f = match File::open(&filename) {
        Err(_) => panic!("Couldn't open file"),
        Ok(file) => file,
    };
    match f.read_to_string(&mut s) {
        Err(_) => panic!("Couldn't read file"),
        Ok(_) => println!("File read successfully"),
    };

}

fn lex(s: &String) -> Vec<&str> {
    let token_string: String = s.replace("(", " ( ")
        .replace(")", " ) ");

    let token_list: Vec<&str> = token_string.split_whitespace()
        .collect();
    token_list
}

fn main() {
    let args: Vec<_> = env::args().collect();
    if args.len() < 2 {
        panic!("Please provide a filename");
    } else {
        let ref filename = args[1];

        let mut s = String::new();
        open(&mut s, filename);
        let token_list: Vec<&str> = lex(&s);
        println!("{:?}", token_list);
    }
}

Here is the error message

error: borrowed value does not live long enough
        self.0.borrow().values.get(idx)
        ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
reference must be valid for the anonymous lifetime #1 defined on the block at 23:54...
    pub fn value(&self, idx: usize) -> Option<&Value> {
                                                      ^
note: ...but borrowed value is only valid for the block at 23:54
    pub fn value(&self, idx: usize) -> Option<&Value> {
                                                      ^

I'm finding it hard to reason with this code because with my level of experience with Rust I can't visualise the lifetimes of these variables. Any help would be appreciated as I've spent an hour or two trying to figure this out.

Answer 1

The problem is that you're allocating a new String (token_string) inside the lex function and then returning an array of references to it, but token_string will get dropped (and the memory freed) as soon as it falls out of scope at the end of the function.

fn lex(s: &String) -> Vec<&str> {
    let token_string: String = s.replace("(", " ( ") // <-- new String allocated 
        .replace(")", " ) "); 

    let token_list: Vec<&str> = token_string.split_whitespace()
        .collect();
    token_list // <-- this is just an array of wide pointers into token_string
} // <-- token_string gets freed here, so the returned pointers
  //     would be pointing to memory that's already been dropped!

There's a couple of ways to address this. One would be to force the caller of lex to pass in the buffer that you want to use to collect into. This would change the signature to fn lex<'a>(input: &String, buffer: &'a mut String) -> Vec<&'a str> This signature would specify that the lifetimes of the returned &strs will be at least as long as the lifetime of the buffer that's passed in.

Another way would be to just return a Vec<String> instead of Vec<&str> if you can tolerate the extra allocations.