How do I concatenate strings?

Question

How do I concatenate the following combinations of types:

• str and str
• String and str
• String and String

Answer 1

When you concatenate strings, you need to allocate memory to store the result. The easiest to start with is String and &str:

fn main() {
    let mut owned_string: String = "hello ".to_owned();
    let borrowed_string: &str = "world";
    
    owned_string.push_str(borrowed_string);
    println!("{}", owned_string);
}

Here, we have an owned string that we can mutate. This is efficient as it potentially allows us to reuse the memory allocation. There's a similar case for String and String, as &String can be dereferenced as &str.

fn main() {
    let mut owned_string: String = "hello ".to_owned();
    let another_owned_string: String = "world".to_owned();
    
    owned_string.push_str(&another_owned_string);
    println!("{}", owned_string);
}

After this, another_owned_string is untouched (note no mut qualifier). There's another variant that consumes the String but doesn't require it to be mutable. This is an implementation of the Add trait that takes a String as the left-hand side and a &str as the right-hand side:

fn main() {
    let owned_string: String = "hello ".to_owned();
    let borrowed_string: &str = "world";
    
    let new_owned_string = owned_string + borrowed_string;
    println!("{}", new_owned_string);
}

Note that owned_string is no longer accessible after the call to +.

What if we wanted to produce a new string, leaving both untouched? The simplest way is to use format!:

fn main() {
    let borrowed_string: &str = "hello ";
    let another_borrowed_string: &str = "world";
    
    let together = format!("{}{}", borrowed_string, another_borrowed_string);

    // After https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2795-format-args-implicit-identifiers.html
    // let together = format!("{borrowed_string}{another_borrowed_string}");

    println!("{}", together);
}

Note that both input variables are immutable, so we know that they aren't touched. If we wanted to do the same thing for any combination of String, we can use the fact that String also can be formatted:

fn main() {
    let owned_string: String = "hello ".to_owned();
    let another_owned_string: String = "world".to_owned();
    
    let together = format!("{}{}", owned_string, another_owned_string);

    // After https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2795-format-args-implicit-identifiers.html
    // let together = format!("{owned_string}{another_owned_string}");
    println!("{}", together);
}

You don't have to use format! though. You can clone one string and append the other string to the new string:

fn main() {
    let owned_string: String = "hello ".to_owned();
    let borrowed_string: &str = "world";
    
    let together = owned_string.clone() + borrowed_string;
    println!("{}", together);
}

Note - all of the type specification I did is redundant - the compiler can infer all the types in play here. I added them simply to be clear to people new to Rust, as I expect this question to be popular with that group!

Answer 2

To concatenate multiple strings into a single string, separated by another character, there are a couple of ways.

The nicest I have seen is using the join method on an array:

fn main() {
    let a = "Hello";
    let b = "world";
    let result = [a, b].join("\n");

    print!("{}", result);
}

Depending on your use case you might also prefer more control:

fn main() {
    let a = "Hello";
    let b = "world";
    let result = format!("{}\n{}", a, b);

    print!("{}", result);
}

There are some more manual ways I have seen, some avoiding one or two allocations here and there. For readability purposes I find the above two to be sufficient.

Answer 3

I think that concat method and + should be mentioned here as well:

assert_eq!(
  ("My".to_owned() + " " + "string"),
  ["My", " ", "string"].concat()
);

and there is also concat! macro but only for literals:

let s = concat!("test", 10, 'b', true);
assert_eq!(s, "test10btrue");

Answer 4

Simple ways to concatenate strings in Rust

There are various methods available in Rust to concatenate strings

First method (Using concat!() ):

fn main() {
    println!("{}", concat!("a", "b"))
}

The output of the above code is :

ab

---

Second method (using push_str() and + operator):

fn main() {
    let mut _a = "a".to_string();
    let _b = "b".to_string();
    let _c = "c".to_string();

    _a.push_str(&_b);

    println!("{}", _a);

    println!("{}", _a + &_c);
}

The output of the above code is:

ab

abc

---

Third method (Using format!()):

fn main() {
    let mut _a = "a".to_string();
    let _b = "b".to_string();
    let _c = format!("{}{}", _a, _b);

    println!("{}", _c);
}

The output of the above code is :

ab

Check it out and experiment with Rust playground.

Answer 5

2020 Update: Concatenation by String Interpolation

RFC 2795 issued 2019-10-27: Suggests support for implicit arguments to do what many people would know as "string interpolation" -- a way of embedding arguments within a string to concatenate them.

RFC: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2795-format-args-implicit-identifiers.html

Latest issue status can be found here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/67984

At the time of this writing (2020-9-24), I believe this feature should be available in the Rust Nightly build.

This will allow you to concatenate via the following shorthand:

format_args!("hello {person}")

It is equivalent to this:

format_args!("hello {person}", person=person)

There is also the "ifmt" crate, which provides its own kind of string interpolation:

https://crates.io/crates/ifmt