How to find and replace all occurrences of a substring in a string?

Question

I need to search a string and edit the formatting of it.

So far I can replace the first occurrence of the string, but I am unable to do so with the next occurrences

Answer 1

/// Returns a version of 'str' where every occurrence of
/// 'find' is substituted by 'replace'.
/// - Inspired by James Kanze.
/// - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20406744/
std::string replace_all(
    const std::string & str ,   // where to work
    const std::string & find ,  // substitute 'find'
    const std::string & replace //      by 'replace'
) {
    using namespace std;
    string result;
    size_t find_len = find.size();
    size_t pos,from=0;
    while ( string::npos != ( pos=str.find(find,from) ) ) {
        result.append( str, from, pos-from );
        result.append( replace );
        from = pos + find_len;
    }
    result.append( str, from , string::npos );
    return result;
/*
    This code might be an improvement to James Kanze's
    because it uses std::string methods instead of
    general algorithms [as 'std::search()'].
*/
}

int main() {
    {
        std::string test    = "*A ... *A ... *A ...";
        std::string changed = "*A\n ... *A\n ... *A\n ...";

        assert( changed == replace_all( test, "*A", "*A\n" ) );
    }
    {
        std::string GB = "My gorila ate the banana";

        std::string gg = replace_all( GB, "gorila", "banana" );
        assert( gg ==  "My banana ate the banana" );
        gg = replace_all( gg, "banana", "gorila"  );
        assert( gg ==  "My gorila ate the gorila" );

        std::string bb = replace_all( GB, "banana", "gorila" );
        assert( gg ==  "My gorila ate the gorila" );
        bb = replace_all( bb, "gorila" , "banana" );
        assert( bb ==  "My banana ate the banana" );
    }
    {
        std::string str, res;

        str.assign( "ababaabcd" );
        res = replace_all( str, "ab", "fg");
        assert( res == "fgfgafgcd" );

        str="aaaaaaaa"; assert( 8==str.size() );
        res = replace_all( str, "aa", "a" );
        assert( res == "aaaa" );
        assert( "" == replace_all( str, "aa", "" ) );

        str = "aaaaaaa"; assert( 7==str.size() );
        res = replace_all( str, "aa", "a" );
        assert( res == "aaaa" );

        str = "..aaaaaa.."; assert( 10==str.size() );
        res = replace_all( str, "aa", "a" );
        assert( res == "..aaa.." );

        str = "baaaac"; assert( 6==str.size() );
        res = replace_all( str, "aa", "" );
        assert( res == "bc" );
    }
}