In general, I need to check if a given string is a number. So I thought my function will check:
1. If the first char is '-' I want to check if there are only digits after it.
2. If the first char is 0 the length of the string has to be less than 3.
The problem: I cannot find a way to get the first char in the string, like if I would do it in C (just look if it is equal to ASCII number), nor in Java, where I would compare strings with equals().
Here's a handy utility function to parse numbers based on streams:
template <class T>
bool try_parse_number(std::string_view s, T& v, const std::locale& locale)
{
std::stringstream stream;
stream.imbue(locale);
stream << s;
stream >> v;
return !stream.fail();
}
Requires the includes <sstream>, <string_view> and <locale>, although you could strip the locale handling out.
You can further create a custom locale and a number facet to control number parsing to a greater degree.
I think in java it will be much easier since using a function --> s.charAt(0). you can easily take the first character of that string and can store that character and later you can compare that to anything.
Related
Suppose I have a string that contains a necessary numeric character but it is not terminated by '/0', it has garbage characters instead. Actually, the string has garbage characters after the number. So how to deal with the garbage character while storing that numerical character in another string or variable?
So how to deal with the garbage character while storing that numerical character in another string or variable?
Only copy a substring. Example:
std::string example "garbage1garbage";
char numerical = example[7];
We got the numerical character excluding the garbage entirely.
If the text be converted is in a std::string, then you can extract a number from the front as follows:
#include <sstream>
...
std::string input = "128734garbage";
std::istringstream iss{input};
int num;
if (iss >> num)
...use_num...
else
std::cerr << "wasn't able to parse an int from input\n";
Just change int to double, uint64_t, ... - whatever suits your data.
If you have only a pointer to the text and know it's not null-terminated, just getting the text into a std::string is problematic. You could instead use a function that converts text to a number, but stops at the first invalid character. std::stol et al, and the other unsigned and floating point variants linked from the same reference page, are good candidates for that.
From your "another string or variable" - the above addresses storing into a numeric variable. You can then create a new std::string from the number using std::to_string, or a std::ostringstream, if that's what you want to do. This will standardise the output format though, so input like say "1E4" might end up looking like say 1000.0. Alternatively, with the stol-type functions you can use the pointer-to-the-end-of-the-number to work out the length of the numeric part, and use std::string::substr() to extract the leading number as a new std::string object.
You should also be aware that the distinction between number and garbage is not always what you might expect. For example "0XBEFHJQ" might be split by some of the above functions as 0xBEF hex and HJQ garbage.
I'm wanting to save the content of a file to a struct. I've tried to use seekg and read to write to it but it isn't working.
My file is something like:
johnmayer24ericclapton32
I want to store the name, the last name and the age in a struct like that
typedef struct test_struct{
string name;
string last_name;
int age;
} test_struct;
Here is my code
int main(){
test_struct ts;
ifstream data_base;
data_base.open("test_file.txt");
data_base.seekg(0, ios_base::beg);
data_base.read(ts, sizeof(test_struct));
data_base.close();
return 0;
}
It doesn't compile as it don't want me to use ts on the read function. Is there another way - or a way - of doing it?
Serialization/Deserialization of strings is tricky.
As binary data the convention is to output the length of the string first, then the string data.
https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/serialization#serialize-binary-format
String data is tricky because you have to unambiguously know when the string’s body stops. You can’t unambiguously terminate all strings with a '\0' if some string might contain that character; recall that std::string can store '\0'. The easiest solution is to write the integer length just before the string data. Make sure the integer length is written in “network format” to avoid sizeof and endian problems (see the solutions in earlier bullets).
That way when reading the data back in you know the length of the string to expect and can preallocate the size of the string then just read that much data from the stream.
If your data is a non-binary (text) format it's a little trickier:
https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/serialization#serialize-text-format
String data is tricky because you have to unambiguously know when the string’s body stops. You can’t unambiguously terminate all strings with a '\n' or '"' or even '\0' if some string might contain those characters. You might want to use C++ source-code escape-sequences, e.g., writing '\' followed by 'n' when you see a newline, etc. After this transformation, you can either make strings go until end-of-line (meaning they are deliminated by '\n') or you can delimit them with '"'.
If you use C++-like escape-sequences for your string data, be sure to always use the same number of hex digits after '\x' and '\u'. I typically use 2 and 4 digits respectively. Reason: if you write a smaller number of hex digits, e.g., if you simply use stream << "\x" << hex << unsigned(theChar), you’ll get errors when the next character in the string happens to be a hex digit. E.g., if the string contains '\xF' followed by 'A', you should write "\x0FA", not "\xFA".
If you don’t use some sort of escape sequence for characters like '\n', be careful that the operating system doesn’t mess up your string data. In particular, if you open a std::fstream without std::ios::binary, some operating systems translate end-of-line characters.
Another approach for string data is to prefix the string’s data with an integer length, e.g., to write "now is the time" as 15:now is the time. Note that this can make it hard for people to read/write the file, since the value just after that might not have a visible separator, but you still might find it useful.
Text-based serialization/deserialization convention varies but one field per line is an accepted practice.
You'll have to develop a specific algorithm, since there is no separator character between the "fields".
static const std::string input_text = "johnmayer24ericclapton32";
static const std::string alphabet = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
static const std::string decimal_digit = "0123456789";
std::string::size_type position = 0;
std::string artist_name;
position = input_text.find_first_not_of(alphabet);
if (position != std::string::npos)
{
artist_name = input_text.substr(0, position - 1);
}
else
{
cerr << "Artist name not found.";
return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
Similarly, you can extract out the number, then use std::stoi to convert the numeric string to internal representation number.
Edit 1: Splitting the name
Since there is no separator character between the first and last name, you may want to have a list of possible first names and use that to find out where the first name ends and the surname starts.
This is the code I wrote to convert integer to string.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string s;
int b=5;
s.push_back((char)b);
cout<<s<<endl;
}
I expected the output to be 5 but it is giving me blank space.
I know there is another way of doing it using stringstream but I want to know what is wrong in this method?
Character code for numbers are not equal to the integer the character represents in typical system.
It is granteed that character codes for decimal digits are consecutive (N3337 2.3 Character sets, Paragraph 3), so you can add '0' to convert one-digit number to character.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string s;
int b=5;
s.push_back((char)(b + '0'));
cout<<s<<endl;
}
You are interpreting the integer 5 as a character. In ASCII encoding, 5 is the Enquiry control character as you lookup here.
The character 5 on the other hand is represented by the decimal number 53.
As others said, you can't convert an integer to a string the way you are doing it.
IMHO, the best way to do it is using the C++11 method std::to_string.
Your example would translate to:
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string s;
int b=5;
s = to_string(b);
cout<<s<<endl;
}
The problem in your code is that you are converting the integer 5 to ASCII (=> ENQ ASCII code, which is not "printable").
To convert it to ASCII properly, you have to add the ASCII code of '0' (48), so:
char ascii = b + '0';
However, to convert an integer to std::string use:
std::stringstream ss; //from <sstream>
ss << 5;
std::string s = ss.str ();
I always use this helper function in my projects:
template <typename T>
std::string toString (T arg)
{
std::stringstream ss;
ss << arg;
return ss.str ();
}
Also, you can use stringstream,
std::to_string doesn't work for me on GCC
If we were writing C++ from scratch in 2016, maybe we would make this work. However as it choose to be (mostly) backward compatible with a fairly low level language like C, 'char' is in fact just a number, that string/printing algorithms interpret as a character -but most of the language doesn't treat special. Including the cast. So by doing (char) you're only converting a 32 bit signed number (int) to a 8 bit signed number (char).
Then you interpret it as a character when you print it, since printing functions do treat it special. But the value it gets printed to is not '5'. The correspondence is conventional and completely arbitrary; the first numbers were reserved to special codes which are probably obsolete by now. As Hoffman pointed out, the bit value 5 is the code for Enquiry (whatever it means), while to print '5' the character has to contain the value 53. To print a proper space you'd need to enter 32. It has no meaning other than someone decided this was as good as anything, sometime decades ago, and the convention stuck.
If you need to know for other characters and values, what you need is an "ASCII table". Just google it, you'll find plenty.
You'll notice that numbers and letters of the same case are next to each other in the order you expect, so there is some logic to it at least. Beware, however, it's often not intuitive anyway: uppercase letters are before lowercase ones for instance, so 'A' < 'a'.
I guess you're starting to see why it's better to rely on dedicated system functions for strings!
Sort of an odd question- how would I go about generating a character string that doesn't match any in a set of strings? I don't want to make any assumptions about the strings. Solution is ideally STL based, but doesn't have to be
Example:
vector<string> strings;
/*...*/
string unMatching = generateUnmatching(strings); //this is the function I want
assert(find(strings.begin(), strings.end(), unMatching) == strings.end());
One way is to use diagonalization:
Start with an empty string s.
Look at the first character of the first string in the set. Choose any character other than that one, and append it to s.
Look at the second character of the second string in the set. Choose any character other than that one, and append it to s.
Follow the same pattern, always looking at the ith character of the ith string and appending a different character to s.
When you've finished with the last string in the set, s will differ from every string in the set in at least one position.
Another method would be to copy the longest string in the set and append any character to the copy. This new string will be different from every string in the set.
There are all kinds of other ways to accomplish the same thing. Adding some constraints to the problem would help in selecting an algorithm that makes the most sense for your problem. For example, you might decide to generate the shortest string that doesn't match any string in the set, or one with the lowest lexigraphic sort value, or one with the smallest number of characters in common with the other strings, or...
If you really don't have any requirement about the result string, you could simply do:
string answer = "a";
while (find(strings.begin(), strings.end(), unMatching) != strings.end())
answer += "a";
Apparently it doesn't seem to be what you want.
Here's the optimized solution that helps you find the shortest possible answer in the least amount of time:
Build a trie with your character set.
Do a breadth-first search from the root node, the first encountered empty node would be the shortest answer.
The time complexity of the optimized implementation is O(number_of_characters_in_all_strings), while a simple implementation with vector loop and lookup would be O(number_of_strings*lenth_of_string).
You could use a uuid generator, like the one from boost:
#include <boost/uuid/uuid.hpp>
#include <boost/uuid/uuid_io.hpp>
#include <boost/uuid/uuid_generators.hpp>
int main()
{
using namespace boost::uuids;
random_generator gen;
uuid u = gen();
std::string s = to_string(u);
std::cout << s;
}
you can use a random number generator (an example below) I think the ascii printable characters start at 33 and end at 127 and from -1 to -95
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h> //only for printf
#define RANDINT(r) ((int)(r * (float)random() /(float)RAND_MAX + 0.5))
#define OFFSETRANDINT(r,o) (RANDINT(r) + o)
#define RANDINTX2Y(x,y) (OFFSETRANDINT((y-x),x))
int main(){
srandom(time(NULL)); // important to call this first, but only once
printf("%d\n",RANDINT(2147483647)); //a random int between 0 and 2147483647
printf("%d\n",OFFSETRANDINT(10,10)); //starting # 10 with a range of 10 (10-20)
printf("%d\n",RANDINTX2Y(0,10)); //between 0 and 10
}
you may need to cast the int to (char) so that you can store it in a string
then you can use either strstr or strcasestr depending on whether case matters
just strcat each string onto the "haystack" if it returns ! TRUE
#include <string.h>
char *strstr(const char *haystack, const char *needle);
char *strcasestr(const char *haystack, const char *needle);
I have a task to implement "void makeAmbigram(char*)" that will print on screen ambigram of latin string or return something like 'ambigram not possible'. Guess it's just about checking if string contains only of SNOXZHI and printing string backwards. Or am I wrong ?
I'm a complete noob when dealing with cpp so that's what I've created :
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
char[]words;
char[]reversed;
char[] ret_str(char* s)
{
if(*s != '\0')
ret_str(s+1);
return s;
}
void makeAmbigram(char* c)
{
/* finding chars XIHNOZS and printing ambigram */
}
int main()
{
cin>>words;
reversed = ret_str(words);
makeAmbigram(reversed);
return 0;
}
I can reverse string but how to check if my reversed string contains only needed chars ?
I've found some function but it's hard or even imposible to implement it for greater amount of chars : www.java2s.com/Code/C/String/Findcharacterinstringhowtousestrchr.htm
You need to allocate space in your arrays or use std::vector. The arrays word and reversed are just pointers and no space is allocated. The C++ language does not support dynamic arrays; however, the STL provides std::vector which dynamically allocates space as required.
Change:
char[]words;
char[]reversed;
To:
#define MAX_LETTERS 64
char words[MAX_LETTERS + 1]; // + 1 for terminating nul character ('\0')
char reversed[MAX_LETTERS + 1];
Or:
#include <string>
std::string words;
std::string reversed;
Or:
#include <vector>
std::vector<char> words;
std::vector<char> reversed;
As far as the ambigram rules go, you need to talk to your instructor. Also, if this is homework, add a tag indicating so.
Hint: The std::string data type has some reverse iterators which may be of use to you.
std::string has an entire family of member functions along the lines of find_first_of. You can pass in a string containing all the letters your ambigram test requires, and they'll find whether any of those letters are present in the source string.
The complete list of string functions is available here.
As for the definition of ambigrams, given the wiki page you've included in the question...you need to check if a letter is legible if viewed upside down, for eg. u/n, w/m, d/p, q/b and so on. There are of course more complex rules was well, for eg. 'ui' can resemble 'm' if viewed upside down.
However, if you're only required to check if your string contains only SNOXZHI, you can look into a regular expression (regex) for the same, and compare input string character-wise to your regex.