## Reading a File

Now we’ll add functionality to read the file specified in the `file_path` argument. First, we need a sample file to test it with: We’ll use a file with a small amount of text over multiple lines with some repeated words. Listing 12-3 has an Emily Dickinson poem that will work well! Create a file called poem.txt at the root level of your project, and enter the poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

Filename: poem.txt

    I'm nobody! Who are you?
    Are you nobody, too?
    Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
    They'd banish us, you know.

    How dreary to be somebody!
    How public, like a frog
    To tell your name the livelong day
    To an admiring bog!

Listing 12-3: A poem by Emily Dickinson makes a good test case.

With the text in place, edit src/main.rs and add code to read the file, as shown in Listing 12-4.

Filename: src/main.rs

    use std::env;
    use std::fs;

    fn main() {
        // --snip--
        let args: Vec<String> = env::args().collect();

        let query = &args[1];
        let file_path = &args[2];

        println!("Searching for {query}");
        println!("In file {file_path}");

        let contents = fs::read_to_string(file_path)
            .expect("Should have been able to read the file");

        println!("With text:\n{contents}");
    }

Listing 12-4: Reading the contents of the file specified by the second argument

First, we bring in a relevant part of the standard library with a `use` statement: We need `std::fs` to handle files.

In `main`, the new statement `fs::read_to_string` takes the `file_path`, opens that file, and returns a value of type `std::io::Result<String>` that contains the file’s contents.

After that, we again add a temporary `println!` statement that prints the value of `contents` after the file is read so that we can check that the program is working so far.

Let’s run this code with any string as the first command line argument (because we haven’t implemented the searching part yet) and the poem.txt file as the second argument:

    $ cargo run -- the poem.txt
       Compiling minigrep v0.1.0 (file:///projects/minigrep)
        Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.0s
         Running `target/debug/minigrep the poem.txt`
    Searching for the
    In file poem.txt
    With text:
    I'm nobody! Who are you?
    Are you nobody, too?
    Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
    They'd banish us, you know.

    How dreary to be somebody!
    How public, like a frog
    To tell your name the livelong day
    To an admiring bog!

Great! The code read and then printed the contents of the file. But the code has a few flaws. At the moment, the `main` function has multiple responsibilities: Generally, functions are clearer and easier to maintain if each function is responsible for only one idea. The other problem is that we’re not handling errors as well as we could. The program is still small, so these flaws aren’t a big problem, but as the program grows, it will be harder to fix them cleanly. It’s a good practice to begin refactoring early on when developing a program because it’s much easier to refactor smaller amounts of code. We’ll do that next.