[brians]

Can you help me understand what’s happening between the split and the filter on “a <space> <space> <space> b”? I expect that to be a series of calls to split, each yielding an empty slice. So the whole iterator yields a slice pointing at a, then a slice pointing at b—but it’s had to handle three intermediate slices to get the b. Right?

[LegionMammal978]

It creates a Split<'_> iterator using the IsWhitespace function as the pattern. As the user calls .next() on the outer SplitWhitespace<'_>, it calls .next() on the inner Split<'_>, which yields slices "a", "", "", and "b", and the filtered iterator reduces them to "a" and "b".

(But as mentioned, this doesn't perform any allocations, since each slice is just a pointer + length into the original string.)