Honestly the main reason it works like this is that it was my first foray into Rust, and I found JSON parsing a bit of a pain, whereas matching status codes was very simple. If we expand it to return different options in the future then I'll probably rework it.

Interesting, if you happen to have some time, I'd love to hear about why parsing JSON was a pain.

Laziness :D

I think I was having trouble with string lifecycles due to how I was doing something, and at the time I didn't understand them (I'm still not super sharp on it if I'm honest) and just opted to take an easy way out. Lifecycle notation might be the one bit of Rust I find ugly, actually.

I should really revisit this little program at some point, but it's so stupidly simple and works so reliably that I haven't had the inclination to yet.

Gotcha!

FWIW, serde_json makes it very easy; if you were doing it yourself, I can see how it'd be harder :)

The second edition of the book's ownership and borrowing chapters go into String vs &str in great detail, if you want to become super sharp :)

(and yeah, we agree that the lifetime annotation isn't very nice looking, but every alternative we tried looked worse.)

Awesome, thanks for the tips Steve :D Hopefully we'll have a few other projects coming up that I can use as an excuse to do more Rust!