How refer to a lifetime of a struct that takes no lifetime parameters

I’m trying to implement an iterator for a 2D board. This Board is of the type [[Option<u8>; SIZE]; SIZE] and I created an iterator for traversing a square of given length.

struct SquareIterator<'a> {
    board: &'a Board,
    sqr_size: usize,
    row: usize,
    col: usize,
    row_iter: usize,
    col_iter: usize,
}

For convenience I figured I could implement the IntoIterator on Board to traverse the whole board aka a SquareIterator of sqr_size = SIZE and row=col=0.

So first tried this:

impl<'a> IntoIterator for Board<'a> {
    type IntoIter = SquareIterator<'a>;
    type Item = <SquareIterator<'a> as Iterator>::Item;
    fn into_iter(self) -> Self::IntoIter { /*(...)*/ }
}

not surprisingly it doesn’t compile: error[E0107]: struct takes 0 lifetime arguments but 1 lifetime argument was supplied. Board indeed takes no lifetime arguments.

But I somehow want to tie the lifetime of SquareIterator to whatever lifetime a Board has. I have no idea how to achieve this.

>Solution :

You’re implementing IntoIterator for the wrong thing!
Since your SquareIterator takes a &Board you should implement for that instead:

impl<'a> IntoIterator for &'a Board {
    type IntoIter = SquareIterator<'a>;
    type Item = <SquareIterator<'a> as Iterator>::Item;
    fn into_iter(self) -> Self::IntoIter { /*(...)*/ }
}

usually you’d add a iter or similarly named method to the inherent impl block of Board as well:

impl Board {
    fn iter(&self) -> SquareIterator<'_> {
        self.into_iter()
    }
}