First Word Extractor

A Rust command-line utility that extracts the first and second words from a given string input. The project serves as both a functional word extraction utility and an educational example of Rust's ownership and borrowing system, with detailed comments explaining the algorithms and memory management principles.

Features

• Extracts the first word from a string
• Extracts the second word from a string
• Handles edge cases like empty strings and single-word inputs
• Memory efficient using string slices

Algorithms

First Word Extraction

The first_word function extracts the first word from a string using the following approach:

1. Converts the input string to bytes for efficient iteration
2. Iterates through each byte in the string
3. Returns the substring from the start up to (but not including) the first space character
4. If no space is found, returns the entire string as it's considered a single word

Second Word Extraction

The second_word function extracts the second word using this approach:

1. Tracks word boundaries using start and end indices
2. Iterates through the string to find the second word
3. Identifies the second word as the sequence of characters between the first and second spaces
4. Handles edge cases where the input might have fewer than two words

Prerequisites

• mise - A version manager for multiple languages and tools

Setup

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/Brisinger/first_word.git
   cd first_word

2. Install Rust and tools using mise:

   mise install

   This will install:

   • Rust 1.85.0
   • rustfmt (for code formatting)
   • clippy (for linting)

Development

Building

To build the project with optimizations:

mise run build

Running

To run the optimized release build:

cargo run --release

Development Tasks

• Format code: mise run format
• Check for errors: mise run check
• Run linter: mise run lint
• Run all CI checks: mise run ci

Usage

1. Run the program: cargo run --release
2. Enter a sentence when prompted
3. The program will display the first and second words

Example

$ cargo run
   Compiling first_word v0.1.0 (/path/to/first_word)
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.50s
     Running `target/debug/first_word`
Please enter a sentence: Hello World from Rust
First word: Hello
Second word: World

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Author: Shubhojit Dasgupta