Published by
Nov 14, 2014

Split a String

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In this short article I want to share a short code about splitting a string like in PHP programming language. As we know in PHP there is a function called explode() to split a string by given delimiter (as single char or substring). For example, given a string str = "the quick brown fox" will be splitted by " " (space char). Simply we just call explode(str, " ") and the functions returns array of string {"the", "quick", "brown", "fox"}.
We can write a "PHP explode()"-like using C++, though the given delimiter is limited to a single char only. Our version of explode() returns std::vector<string> as splitted string.
Following is the definition of explode (using C++11):

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const vector<string> explode(const string& s, const char& c)
{
	string buff{""};
	vector<string> v;
	
	for(auto n:s)
	{
		if(n != c) buff+=n; else
		if(n == c && buff != "") { v.push_back(buff); buff = ""; }
	}
	if(buff != "") v.push_back(buff);
	
	return v;
}


The code above just a simple function, yet well-tested with various case. Following is the example in main function:

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int main()
{
	string str{"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"};
	vector<string> v{explode(str, ' ')};
	for(auto n:v) cout << n << endl;
	
	return 0;
}


will produces output:


the
quick
brown
fox

This short article my be useful, hopefully.