How to get a word vector from a string? - c++

Question

I want to store words separated by spaces into single string elements in a vector.
The input is a string that may end or may not end in a symbol( comma, period, etc.)
All symbols will be separated by spaces too.
I created this function but it doesn't return me a vector of words.
vector<string> single_words(string sentence)
{
vector<string> word_vector;
string result_word;
for (size_t character = 0; character < sentence.size(); ++character)
{
if (sentence[character] == ' ' && result_word.size() != 0)
{
word_vector.push_back(result_word);
result_word = "";
}
else
result_word += character;
}
return word_vector;
}
What did I do wrong?

Answer 1

Your problem has already been resolved by answers and comments.
I would like to give you the additional information that such functionality is already existing in C++.
You could take advantage of the fact that the extractor operator extracts space separated tokens from a stream. Because a std::string is not a stream, we can put the string first into an std::istringstream and then extract from this stream vie the std:::istream_iterator.
We could life make even more easier.
Since roundabout 10 years we have a dedicated, special C++ functionality for splitting strings into tokens, explicitely designed for this purpose. The std::sregex_token_iterator. And because we have such a dedicated function, we should simply use it.
The idea behind it is the iterator concept. In C++ we have many containers and always iterators, to iterate over the similar elements in these containers. And a string, with similar elements (tokens), separated by a delimiter, can also be seen as such a container. And with the std::sregex:token_iterator, we can iterate over the elements/tokens/substrings of the string, splitting it up effectively.
This iterator is very powerfull and you can do really much much more fancy stuff with it. But that is too much for here. Important is that splitting up a string into tokens is a one-liner. For example a variable definition using a range constructor for iterating over the tokens.
See some examples below:
#include <iostream>
#include <sstream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include <iterator>
#include <algorithm>
#include <regex>
const std::regex delimiter{ " " };
const std::regex reWord{ "(\\w+)" };
int main() {
// Some debug print function
auto print = [](const std::vector<std::string>& sv) -> void {
std::copy(sv.begin(), sv.end(), std::ostream_iterator<std::string>(std::cout, "\n")); std::cout << "\n"; };
// The test string
std::string test{ "word1 word2 word3 word4." };
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Solution 1: use istringstream and then extract from there
std::istringstream iss1(test);
// Define a vector (CTAD), use its range constructor and, the std::istream_iterator as iterator
std::vector words1(std::istream_iterator<std::string>(iss1), {});
print(words1); // Show debug output
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Solution 2: directly use dedicated function sregex_token iterator
std::vector<std::string> words2(std::sregex_token_iterator(test.begin(), test.end(), delimiter, -1), {});
print(words2); // Show debug output
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Solution 3: directly use dedicated function sregex_token iterator and look for words only
std::vector<std::string> words3(std::sregex_token_iterator(test.begin(), test.end(), reWord, 1), {});
print(words3); // Show debug output
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Solution 4: Use such iterator in an algorithm, to copy data to a vector
std::vector<std::string> words4{};
std::copy(std::sregex_token_iterator(test.begin(), test.end(), reWord, 1), {}, std::back_inserter(words4));
print(words4); // Show debug output
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Solution 5: Use such iterator in an algorithm for direct output
std::copy(std::sregex_token_iterator(test.begin(), test.end(), reWord, 1), {}, std::ostream_iterator<std::string>(std::cout,"\n"));
return 0;
}

Answer 2

You added the index instead of the character:
vector<string> single_words(string sentence)
{
vector<string> word_vector;
string result_word;
for (size_t i = 0; i < sentence.size(); ++i)
{
char character = sentence[i];
if (character == ' ' && result_word.size() != 0)
{
word_vector.push_back(result_word);
result_word = "";
}
else
result_word += character;
}
return word_vector;
}

Answer 3

Since your mistake was only due to the reason, that you named your iterator variable character even though it is actually not a character, but rather an iterator or index, I would like to suggest to use a ranged-base loop here, since it avoids this kind of confusion. The clean solution is obviously to do what #ArminMontigny said, but I assume you are prohibited to use stringstreams. The code would look like this:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;
vector<string> single_words(string sentence)
{
vector<string> word_vector;
string result_word;
for (char& character: sentence) // Now `character` is actually a character.
{
if (character==' ' && result_word.size() != 0)
{
word_vector.push_back(result_word);
result_word = "";
}
else
result_word += character;
}
word_vector.push_back(result_word); // In your solution, you forgot to push the last word into the vector.
return word_vector;
}
int main() {
string sentence="Maybe try range based loops";
vector<string> result= single_words(sentence);
for(string& word: result)
cout<<word<<" ";
return 0;
}