unclear behavior of binary search on unsorted structures

[max397574]

Location

Local docs from rustup under /std/primitive.slice.html#method.binary_search
also for VecDeque and the other binary search functions (search_by)

Summary

There is written https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/primitive.slice.html#method.binary_search

Binary searches this slice for a given element. This behaves similarly to contains if this slice is sorted.

To me this first sounded like the binary search would work on all the slices and if it would be sorted sth would be different. Some people told me that it won't work if the slice isn't sorted and it will just output garbage.

If this really is the case it should be written that it only works for sorted slices (and VecDeques).
In any case the different behaviors when sorted and unsorted should be clarified
(e.g. if linear search is done on unsorted slice)

[jofas]

I'd be happy to add warnings and examples to the documentation of the binary_search_[by] methods of slice and VecDeque. @scottmcm can I claim this issue?

[workingjubilee]

@jofas Go for it. In the future you can @ rustbot claim.

[jofas]

thanks @workingjubilee, will do next time 🙂