Would this be a correct syntax for error handling when making an http request?
from dontblink@feddit.it to rust@lemmy.ml on 25 Oct 2024 10:22
https://feddit.it/post/11903677

Hi! I’m trying to learn Rust, as a little project, I’m trying to build a web scraper that will scrape some content and rebuild it with a static site generator, or using it for making POST requests.

I’m still at a very early stage and I still don’t know much, the simplest error handling strategy I know is using match with Result.

To my eyes, this syntax looks correct, but also looks kind of a lot of lines for a simple http request.

I know the reqwest docs suggest to handle errors with the ? operator, which I don’t know yet, therefore I’m just using what I know now.

fn get_document(permalink: String) -> Html {
        let html_content_result = reqwest::blocking::get(&permalink);
        let html_content = match html_content_result {
            Ok(response) => response,
            Err(error) => panic!("There was an error making the request: {:?}", error),
        };

        let html_content_text_result = html_content.text();
        let html_content_text = match html_content_text_result {
            Ok(text) => text,
            Err(error) =>
                panic!(
                    "There was an error getting the html text from the content of response: :{:?}",
                    error
                ),
        };

        let document = Html::parse_document(&html_content_text);

        document
    }

As for my understanding, this is what I’m doing here: I’m making an http request, if i get a Response, I try to get the text out of the response body, otherwise I handle the error by panicking with a custom message. Getting the text out of the request body is another passage that requires error handling, therefore I use the match expression again to get the text out and handle the possible error (In what circumstances can extracting the text of a response body fail?).

Then I can finally parse the document and return it!

I wonder if it is a correct and understandable way of doing what I’ve in mind.

Do you think this would be a suitable project for someone who is at chapter 7 of the Rust book? I feel like i actually need to build somethiong before keep going with the theory!

#rust