Is There A Built-In Way to Split Strings In C++?

Question

well is there? by string i mean std::string

Answer 1

There's no built-in way to split a string in C++, but boost provides the string algo library to do all sort of string manipulation, including string splitting.

Answer 2

Yup, stringstream.

std::istringstream oss(std::string("This is a test string"));
std::string word;
while(oss >> word) {
    std::cout << "[" << word << "] ";
}

Answer 3

The answer is no. You have to break them up using one of the library functions.

Something I use:

std::vector<std::string> parse(std::string l, char delim) 
{
    std::replace(l.begin(), l.end(), delim, ' ');
    std::istringstream stm(l);
    std::vector<std::string> tokens;
    for (;;) {
        std::string word;
        if (!(stm >> word)) break;
        tokens.push_back(word);
    }
    return tokens;
}

You can also take a look at the basic_streambuf<T>::underflow() method and write a filter.

Answer 4

STL strings

You can use string iterators to do your dirty work.

std::string str = "hello world";

std::string::const_iterator pos = std::find(string.begin(), string.end(), ' '); // Split at ' '.

std::string left(str.begin(), pos);
std::string right(pos + 1, str.end());

// Echoes "hello|world".
std::cout << left << "|" << right << std::endl;

Answer 5

Here's a perl-style split function I use:

void split(const string& str, const string& delimiters , vector<string>& tokens)
{
    // Skip delimiters at beginning.
    string::size_type lastPos = str.find_first_not_of(delimiters, 0);
    // Find first "non-delimiter".
    string::size_type pos     = str.find_first_of(delimiters, lastPos);

    while (string::npos != pos || string::npos != lastPos)
    {
        // Found a token, add it to the vector.
        tokens.push_back(str.substr(lastPos, pos - lastPos));
        // Skip delimiters.  Note the "not_of"
        lastPos = str.find_first_not_of(delimiters, pos);
        // Find next "non-delimiter"
        pos = str.find_first_of(delimiters, lastPos);
    }
}

Answer 6

C strings

Simply insert a \0 where you wish to split. This is about as built-in as you can get with standard C functions.

This function splits on the first occurance of a char separator, returning the second string.

char *split_string(char *str, char separator) {
    char *second = strchr(str, separator);
    if(second == NULL)
        return NULL;

    *second = '\0';
    ++second;
    return second;
}