rustHow to sort a struct in Rust

Sorting a struct in Rust can be done using the sort_by method on a vector of structs. This method takes a closure as an argument which defines the sorting criteria. The example code below sorts a vector of structs by the name field in ascending order.

struct Person {
    name: String,
    age: u8,
}

let mut people = vec![
    Person { name: "John".to_string(), age: 30 },
    Person { name: "Alice".to_string(), age: 20 },
    Person { name: "Bob".to_string(), age: 25 },
];

people.sort_by(|a, b| a.name.cmp(&b.name));

for person in people {
    println!("{} is {} years old", person.name, person.age);
}

Output example

Alice is 20 years old
Bob is 25 years old
John is 30 years old

Code explanation

1. struct Person - defines a struct with two fields, name and age, both of type String and u8 respectively.
2. let mut people = vec![...] - creates a mutable vector of Person structs.
3. people.sort_by(|a, b| a.name.cmp(&b.name)) - sorts the vector of Person structs by the name field in ascending order using the sort_by method. The closure passed to sort_by takes two arguments, a and b, and compares the name fields of each using the cmp method.
4. for person in people { ... } - iterates over the sorted vector of Person structs and prints out each person's name and age.

Helpful links

• Rust Book - Sorting
• Rust Docs - sort_by
• Rust Docs - cmp

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