Destructuring

Like tuples, structs and enums can also be destructured by matching:

Structs

struct Foo {
    x: (u32, u32),
    y: u32,
}

#[rustfmt::skip]
fn main() {
    let foo = Foo { x: (1, 2), y: 3 };
    match foo {
        Foo { x: (1, b), y } => println!("x.0 = 1, b = {b}, y = {y}"),
        Foo { y: 2, x: i }   => println!("y = 2, x = {i:?}"),
        Foo { y, .. }        => println!("y = {y}, other fields were ignored"),
    }
}

Enums

Patterns can also be used to bind variables to parts of your values. This is how you inspect the structure of your types. Let us start with a simple enum type:

enum Result {
    Ok(i32),
    Err(String),
}

fn divide_in_two(n: i32) -> Result {
    if n % 2 == 0 {
        Result::Ok(n / 2)
    } else {
        Result::Err(format!("cannot divide {n} into two equal parts"))
    }
}

fn main() {
    let n = 100;
    match divide_in_two(n) {
        Result::Ok(half) => println!("{n} divided in two is {half}"),
        Result::Err(msg) => println!("sorry, an error happened: {msg}"),
    }
}

Here we have used the arms to destructure the Result value. In the first arm, half is bound to the value inside the Ok variant. In the second arm, msg is bound to the error message.