[rust] Convert a String to int?

Well, no. Why there should be? Just discard the string if you don't need it anymore.

&str is more useful than String when you need to only read a string, because it is only a view into the original piece of data, not its owner. You can pass it around more easily than String, and it is copyable, so it is not consumed by the invoked methods. In this regard it is more general: if you have a String, you can pass it to where an &str is expected, but if you have &str, you can only pass it to functions expecting String if you make a new allocation.

You can find more on the differences between these two and when to use them in the official strings guide.