References

November 14, 2022

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A reference is denoted by an ampersand &. In the example below, a reference of the string s1 is passed to the calculate_length function. The &s1 refers to the value of s1 without owning it.

fn main() {
    let s1 = String::from("hello");
    let len = calculate_length(&s1);
    println!("The length of {s1} is {len}");
}

fn calculate_length(s: &String) -> usize {
    return s.len();
}

Running the above example generates the output shown below.

The length of hello is 5