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How to create an in-memory object that can be used as a Reader, Writer, or Seek in Rust?

Submitted by: @import:stackoverflow-api·Mar 10, 2026·

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Problem

I need a completely in-memory object that I can give to BufReader and BufWriter. Something like Python's StringIO. I want to write to and read from such an object using methods ordinarily used with Files.

Is there a way to do this using the standard library?

Solution

In fact there is a way: Cursor!

(please also read Shepmaster's answer on why often it's even easier)

In the documentation you can see that there are the following impls:

impl Seek for Cursor where T: AsRef
impl Read for Cursor where T: AsRef
impl Write for Cursor>
impl AsRef for Vec

From this you can see that you can use the type Cursor> just as an ordinary file, because Read, Write and Seek are implemented for that type!

Little example (Playground):

use std::io::{Cursor, Read, Seek, SeekFrom, Write};

// Create fake "file"
let mut c = Cursor::new(Vec::new());

// Write into the "file" and seek to the beginning
c.write_all(&[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]).unwrap();
c.seek(SeekFrom::Start(0)).unwrap();

// Read the "file's" contents into a vector
let mut out = Vec::new();
c.read_to_end(&mut out).unwrap();

println!("{:?}", out);

For a more useful example, check the documentation linked above.

Code Snippets

impl<T> Seek for Cursor<T> where T: AsRef<[u8]>
impl<T> Read for Cursor<T> where T: AsRef<[u8]>
impl Write for Cursor<Vec<u8>>
impl<T> AsRef<[T]> for Vec<T>

use std::io::{Cursor, Read, Seek, SeekFrom, Write};

// Create fake "file"
let mut c = Cursor::new(Vec::new());

// Write into the "file" and seek to the beginning
c.write_all(&[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]).unwrap();
c.seek(SeekFrom::Start(0)).unwrap();

// Read the "file's" contents into a vector
let mut out = Vec::new();
c.read_to_end(&mut out).unwrap();

println!("{:?}", out);

Context

Stack Overflow Q#41069865, score: 89

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