Working with text files

In this recipe, we will learn how to read, write, create, truncate, and append text files. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to apply all other recipes to files instead of in-memory strings.

How to do it...

1. Create a Rust project to work on during this chapter with cargo new chapter-three.
2. Navigate into the newly created chapter-three folder. For the rest of this chapter, we will assume that your command line is currently in this directory.
3. Inside the src folder, create a new folder called bin.
4. Delete the generated lib.rs file, as we are not creating a library.
5. In the src/bin folder, create a file called text_files.rs.
6. Add the following code and run it with cargo run --bin text_files:

1    use std::fs::{File, OpenOptions};
2    use std::io::{self, BufReader, BufWriter, Lines, Write};
3    use std::io::prelude::*;
4 
5    fn main() {
6      // Create a file and fill it with data
7      let path = "./foo.txt";
8      println!("Writing some data to '{}'", path);
9 ...