Split string on delimiter in C++

Some suggest using the Boost libraries for this, but there's an answer to this question on StackOverflow by user Evan Teran (albeit not the accepted answer) that I much prefer because it uses the standard libraries.

As posted on StackOverflow:
The first puts the results in a pre-constructed vector, the second returns a new vector.
std::vector<std::string> &split(const std::string &s, char delim, std::vector<std::string> &elems) {
    std::stringstream ss(s);
    std::string item;
    while (std::getline(ss, item, delim)) {
        elems.push_back(item);
    }
    return elems;
}


std::vector<std::string> split(const std::string &s, char delim) {
    std::vector<std::string> elems;
    split(s, delim, elems);
    return elems;
}
As noted on the StackOverflow post, it can be used like:
std::vector<std::string> x = split("one:two::three", ':');
This overloads the split function, and the second function requires the first, so you need both. As a secondary example, here is a version that I slightly expanded for readability and used as a member function of a class called TimeSeriesSetDataFileParser:
std::vector<std::string> & TimeSeriesSetDataFileParser::SplitString(const std::string &inputString, char delimiter, std::vector<std::string> &elements) {
    std::stringstream sstream(inputString);  //Taken from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/236129/how-to-split-a-string-in-c
    std::string element;
    while (std::getline(sstream, element, delimiter)) {
        elements.push_back(element);
    }
    return elements;
}

std::vector<std::string> TimeSeriesSetDataFileParser::SplitString(const std::string &inputString, char delimiter) {
            std::vector<std::string> elements;   //Taken from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/236129/how-to-split-a-string-in-c
            this->SplitString(inputString, delimiter, elements);
            return elements;
}
And I used it to parse a data file to a 2D vector of strings (the member functions Good() and GetLine() are just methods encapsulating the good() and getline() member functions inherited by ifstream).
    std::cout << "Parsing input data file" << std::endl;
    std::string line;
    std::vector<std::vector<std::string> > vvstr_data;
    std::vector<std::string> vstr_splitLine;

    while (inputTimeSeriesSetDataFile->Good()) {
        line = inputTimeSeriesSetDataFile->GetLine();
        if(inputTimeSeriesSetDataFile->Good()) {
            vstr_splitLine = this->SplitString(line, '\t');
            vvstr_data.push_back(vstr_splitLine);   //For now we just read it into a 2 dimensional vector of strings.
        }
    }

Comments

Popular Posts