How do I tokenize a string in C++?

Question

Java has a convenient split method:

String str = "The quick brown fox";
String[] results = str.split(" ");

Is there an easy way to do this in C++?

Answer 1

No offense folks, but for such a simple problem, you are making things way too complicated. There are a lot of reasons to use Boost. But for something this simple, it's like hitting a fly with a 20# sledge.

void
split( vector<string> & theStringVector,  /* Altered/returned value */
       const  string  & theString,
       const  string  & theDelimiter)
{
    UASSERT( theDelimiter.size(), >, 0); // My own ASSERT macro.

    size_t  start = 0, end = 0;

    while ( end != string::npos)
    {
        end = theString.find( theDelimiter, start);

        // If at end, use length=maxLength.  Else use length=end-start.
        theStringVector.push_back( theString.substr( start,
                       (end == string::npos) ? string::npos : end - start));

        // If at end, use start=maxSize.  Else use start=end+delimiter.
        start = (   ( end > (string::npos - theDelimiter.size()) )
                  ?  string::npos  :  end + theDelimiter.size());
    }
}

For example (for Doug's case),

#define SHOW(I,X)   cout << "[" << (I) << "]\t " # X " = \"" << (X) << "\"" << endl

int
main()
{
    vector<string> v;

    split( v, "A:PEP:909:Inventory Item", ":" );

    for (unsigned int i = 0;  i < v.size();   i++)
        SHOW( i, v[i] );
}

And yes, we could have split() return a new vector rather than passing one in. It's trivial to wrap and overload. But depending on what I'm doing, I often find it better to re-use pre-existing objects rather than always creating new ones. (Just as long as I don't forget to empty the vector in between!)

Reference: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/.

(I was originally writing a response to Doug's question: C++ Strings Modifying and Extracting based on Separators (closed). But since Martin York closed that question with a pointer over here... I'll just generalize my code.)

Answer 2

/// split a string into multiple sub strings, based on a separator string
/// for example, if separator="::",
///
/// s = "abc" -> "abc"
///
/// s = "abc::def xy::st:" -> "abc", "def xy" and "st:",
///
/// s = "::abc::" -> "abc"
///
/// s = "::" -> NO sub strings found
///
/// s = "" -> NO sub strings found
///
/// then append the sub-strings to the end of the vector v.
/// 
/// the idea comes from the findUrls() function of "Accelerated C++", chapt7,
/// findurls.cpp
///
void split(const string& s, const string& sep, vector<string>& v)
{
    typedef string::const_iterator iter;
    iter b = s.begin(), e = s.end(), i;
    iter sep_b = sep.begin(), sep_e = sep.end();

    // search through s
    while (b != e){
        i = search(b, e, sep_b, sep_e);

        // no more separator found
        if (i == e){
            // it's not an empty string
            if (b != e)
                v.push_back(string(b, e));
            break;
        }
        else if (i == b){
            // the separator is found and right at the beginning
            // in this case, we need to move on and search for the
            // next separator
            b = i + sep.length();
        }
        else{
            // found the separator
            v.push_back(string(b, i));
            b = i;
        }
    }
}

The boost library is good, but they are not always available. Doing this sort of things by hand is also a good brain exercise. Here we just use the std::search() algorithm from the STL, see the above code.

Answer 3

Simple C++ code (standard C++98), accepts multiple delimiters (specified in a std::string), uses only vectors, strings and iterators.

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <string>
#include <stdexcept> 

std::vector<std::string> 
split(const std::string& str, const std::string& delim){
    std::vector<std::string> result;
    if (str.empty())
        throw std::runtime_error("Can not tokenize an empty string!");
    std::string::const_iterator begin, str_it;
    begin = str_it = str.begin(); 
    do {
        while (delim.find(*str_it) == std::string::npos && str_it != str.end())
            str_it++; // find the position of the first delimiter in str
        std::string token = std::string(begin, str_it); // grab the token
        if (!token.empty()) // empty token only when str starts with a delimiter
            result.push_back(token); // push the token into a vector<string>
        while (delim.find(*str_it) != std::string::npos && str_it != str.end())
            str_it++; // ignore the additional consecutive delimiters
        begin = str_it; // process the remaining tokens
        } while (str_it != str.end());
    return result;
}

int main() {
    std::string test_string = ".this is.a.../.simple;;test;;;END";
    std::string delim = "; ./"; // string containing the delimiters
    std::vector<std::string> tokens = split(test_string, delim);           
    for (std::vector<std::string>::const_iterator it = tokens.begin(); 
        it != tokens.end(); it++)
            std::cout << *it << std::endl;
}

Answer 4

The Boost tokenizer class can make this sort of thing quite simple:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <boost/foreach.hpp>
#include <boost/tokenizer.hpp>

using namespace std;
using namespace boost;

int main(int, char**)
{
    string text = "token, test   string";

    char_separator<char> sep(", ");
    tokenizer< char_separator<char> > tokens(text, sep);
    BOOST_FOREACH (const string& t, tokens) {
        cout << t << "." << endl;
    }
}

Updated for C++11:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <boost/tokenizer.hpp>

using namespace std;
using namespace boost;

int main(int, char**)
{
    string text = "token, test   string";

    char_separator<char> sep(", ");
    tokenizer<char_separator<char>> tokens(text, sep);
    for (const auto& t : tokens) {
        cout << t << "." << endl;
    }
}

Answer 5

You can simply use a regular expression library and solve that using regular expressions.

Use expression (\w+) and the variable in \1 (or $1 depending on the library implementation of regular expressions).

Answer 6

pystring is a small library which implements a bunch of Python's string functions, including the split method:

#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include "pystring.h"

std::vector<std::string> chunks;
pystring::split("this string", chunks);

// also can specify a separator
pystring::split("this-string", chunks, "-");