Owned ParseErrors

[9999years]

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winnow version

master

Describe your use case

Borrowed ParseErrors are tricky and make it difficult to propagate errors past the parsing code. If there was an owned variant of ParseError, I could easily convert an existing error into (e.g.) a miette::Report or some other owned error type without stringifying it and losing its structured information.

Describe the solution you'd like

Generally, the program which calls the parser will have the input in an owned form somewhere, e.g. from calling std::fs::read_to_string. It's not possible to call parsers with &mut String input directly, because Stream::next_token can't be implemented without reallocating the entire remaining input. Therefore, I would like to be able to replace the input field in the ParseError when an error is encountered:

let input = fs::read_to_string("my-input.txt")?;
let parsed = parser.parse(&mut input.as_str())
    .map_err(|err| err.with_input(input))?; // <- Swap out the `&str` input for `String` here.

Note that this requires the offsets to match up between the old and new inputs; if the offset needs to be adjusted, it would be very useful to have the ParseError constructor available as well.

Alternatives, if applicable

#329 suggests implementing ToOwned, but that's not easy for inner references like those ParseError contains.

Additional Context

See: #329

[epage]

If there was an owned variant of ParseError, I could easily convert an existing error into (e.g.) a miette::Report or some other owned error type without stringifying it and losing its structured information.

I feel I'm missing something here. Why does making it owned help with working with miette?

We have an example using annotate-snippets. It does use a custom error type though that is also written for the error type to be in a public API which ParseError likely shouldn't be.

https://docs.rs/winnow/latest/winnow/_tutorial/chapter_7/index.html#error-adaptation-and-rendering