Printing a path in Rust

The following will print out the full path:

println!("{}", p.display());

Refer to Path::display for more details.

As you discovered, the "correct" way to print a Path is via the .display method, which returns a type that implements Display.

There is a reason Path does not implement Display itself: formatting a path to a string is a lossy operation. Not all operating systems store paths compatible with UTF-8 and the formatting routines are implicitly all dealing with UTF-8 data only.

As an example, on my Linux system a single byte with value 255 is a perfectly valid filename, but this is not a valid byte in UTF-8. If you try to print that Path to a string, you have to handle the invalid data somehow: .display will replace invalid UTF-8 byte sequences with the replacement character U+FFFD, but this operation cannot be reversed.

In summary, Paths should rarely be handled as if they were strings, and so they don't implement Display to encourage that.