Implement into_chars for String

[al-yisun]

Proposal

Problem statement

Currently there is no owning analog to the chars iterator. In most contexts this has no real effect, as char is Copy, but it disables some cases where one wants to pass ownership of the underlying String along with the iterator.

Motivating example

Implementing the following function requires some gymnastics.

fn get_chars() -> impl Iterator<Item=char> {
    let s = format!("for one reason or another, you have a String");
    s.chars().filter(|c| ['a','e','i','o','u'].contains(c))
    // error[E0597]: `s` does not live long enough
}

Solution sketch

If into_chars existed, the above function would be simple to write.

fn get_chars() -> impl Iterator<Item=char> {
    let s = format!("for a very good reason, you have a String");
    s.into_chars().filter(|c| ['a','e','i','o','u'].contains(c))
}

Alternatives

It is relatively straightforward to write an owning chars iterator outside of std. As a struct:

struct IntoChars {
    string: String,
    position: usize,
}

impl Iterator for IntoChars {
    type Item = char;

    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<char> {
        let c = self.string[self.position..].chars().next()?;
        self.position += c.len_utf8();
        Some(c)
    }
}

As a closure:

fn into_chars(s: String) -> impl Iterator<Item = char> {
    let mut i = 0;
    std::iter::from_fn(move ||
        if i < s.len() {
            let c = s[i..].chars().next().unwrap();
            i += c.len_utf8();
            Some(c)
        } else {
            None
        }
    )
}

Links and related work

Discussion on irlo.

[Amanieu]

We discussed this in the libs-api meeting yesterday and couldn't think of any other way to achieve this functionality. As such it's fine to add this as an unstable API.

[tisonkun]

@Amanieu I don't find this method on the codebase, it is still valid and I may spend some time to write an impl?

Didn't see referred PR also.

[tisonkun]

Found this related PR - rust-lang/rust#50845

But it's even 5 years earlier than this issue. Let me see if we still want to add such methods.

[tisonkun]

Seems that to avoid duplicate code (of Chars internal) and avoid always make a Chars to access those ability, we'd factor out the Chars functionality into a shared structure and perhaps extend next_code_point to accept Iterator<Item = u8> also.

See https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/50845/files#r189071758 with @shepmaster and @nagisa .

I may spend some time to try to make a draft in weeks.

[programmerjake]

maybe use something like:

pub struct IntoChars {
    bytes: vec::IntoIter<u8>,
}

impl Iterator for IntoChars {
    type Item = char;
    fn next(&mut self) -> Option<Self::Item> {
        let mut chars = unsafe { str::from_utf8_unchecked(self.bytes.as_slice()) }.char_indexes();
        let retval = chars.next()?;
        self.bytes.advance_by(chars.offset());
        Some(retval)
    }
    ...
}

...

[tisonkun]

@programmerjake Thanks for sharing the snippet. This would create a wrapper struct (CharIndices) each time, but it can be cheap?

I'll start with this direction then.