Attempting to check the first character of a string to see if it contains a "/".
string pathname = "/test";
if(pathname.at(0) == "/")
{
// if first character is a slash then delete the slash
// but only delete the slash if it's the first character
pathname.erase(pathname.begin()+0);
}
I understand that the above code will not work because pathname.at(0) is considered an int.
I'm sure this has been asked before. But I have looked around a lot. I've seen the substr method the find method and many others. I can't seem to get them working right though.
Suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Use single quote for character constant.
if(pathname.at(0) == '/')
^ ^
Double quotes, no matter how many characters are inside, represents a C-style string. You can't compare a character to a C-string.
You compare the first symbol code with a pointer to string. Try to compare the first symbol with the char.
if(pathname.at(0) == '/')
Related
Attempting to check the first character of a string to see if it contains a "/".
string pathname = "/test";
if(pathname.at(0) == "/")
{
// if first character is a slash then delete the slash
// but only delete the slash if it's the first character
pathname.erase(pathname.begin()+0);
}
I understand that the above code will not work because pathname.at(0) is considered an int.
I'm sure this has been asked before. But I have looked around a lot. I've seen the substr method the find method and many others. I can't seem to get them working right though.
Suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Use single quote for character constant.
if(pathname.at(0) == '/')
^ ^
Double quotes, no matter how many characters are inside, represents a C-style string. You can't compare a character to a C-string.
You compare the first symbol code with a pointer to string. Try to compare the first symbol with the char.
if(pathname.at(0) == '/')
I need to store a string replacing its spaces with some character. When I retrieve it back I need to replace the character with spaces again. I have thought of this strategy while storing I will replace (space with _a) and (_a with _aa) and while retrieving will replace (_a with space) and (_aa with _a). i.e even if the user enters _a in the string it will be handled. But I dont think this is a good strategy. Please let me know if anyone has a better one?
Replacing spaces with something is a problem when something is already in the string. Why don't you simply encode the string - there are many ways to do that, one is to convert all characters to hexadecimal.
For instance
Hello world!
is encoded as
48656c6c6f20776f726c6421
The space is 0x20. Then you simply decode back (hex to ascii) the string.
This way there are no space in the encoded string.
-- Edit - optimization --
You replace all % and all spaces in the string with %xx where xx is the hex code of the character.
For instance
Wine having 12% alcohol
becomes
Wine%20having%2012%25%20alcohol
%20 is space
%25 is the % character
This way, neither % nor (space) are a problem anymore - Decoding is easy.
Encoding algorithm
- replace all `%` with `%25`
- replace all ` ` with `%20`
Decoding algorithm
- replace all `%xx` with the character having `xx` as hex code
(You may even optimize more since you need to encode only two characters: use %1 for % and %2 for , but I recommend the %xx solution as it is more portable - and may be utilized later on if you need to code more characters)
I'm not sure your solution will work. When reading, how would you
distinguish between strings that were orginally " a" and strings that
were originally "_a": if I understand correctly, both will end up
"_aa".
In general, given a situation were a specific set of characters cannot
appear as such, but must be encoded, the solution is to choose one of
allowed characters as an "escape" character, remove it from the set of
allowed characters, and encode all of the forbidden characters
(including the escape character) as a two (or more) character sequence
starting with the escape character. In C++, for example, a new line is
not allowed in a string or character literal. The escape character is
\; because of that, it must be encoded as an escape sequence as well.
So we have "\n" for a new line (the choice of n is arbitrary), and
"\\" for a \. (The choice of \ for the second character is also
arbitrary, but it is fairly usual to use the escape character, escaped,
to represent itself.) In your case, if you want to use _ as the
escape character, and "_a" to represent a space, the logical choice
would be "__" to represent a _ (but I'd suggest something a little
more visually suggestive—maybe ^ as the escape, with "^_" for
a space and "^^" for a ^). When reading, anytime you see the escape
character, the following character must be mapped (and if it isn't one
of the predefined mappings, the input text is in error). This is simple
to implement, and very reliable; about the only disadvantage is that in
an extreme case, it can double the size of your string.
You want to implement this using C/C++? I think you should split your string into multiple part, separated by space.
If your string is like this : "a__b" (multiple space continuous), it will be splited into:
sub[0] = "a";
sub[1] = "";
sub[2] = "b";
Hope this will help!
With a normal string, using X characters, you cannot write or encode a string with x-1 using only 1 character/input character.
You can use a combination of 2 chars to replace a given character (this is exactly what you are trying in your example).
To do this, loop through your string to count the appearances of a space combined with its length, make a new character array and replace these spaces with "//" this is just an example though. The problem with this approach is that you cannot have "//" in your input string.
Another approach would be to use a rarely used char, for example "^" to replace the spaces.
The last approach, popular in a combination of these two approaches. It is used in unix, and php to have syntax character as a literal in a string. If you want to have a " " ", you simply write it as \" etc.
Why don't you use Replace function
String* stringWithoutSpace= stringWithSpace->Replace(S" ", S"replacementCharOrText");
So now stringWithoutSpace contains no spaces. When you want to put those spaces back,
String* stringWithSpacesBack= stringWithoutSpace ->Replace(S"replacementCharOrText", S" ");
I think just coding to ascii hexadecimal is a neat idea, but of course doubles the amount of storage needed.
If you want to do this using less memory, then you will need two-letter sequences, and have to be careful that you can go back easily.
You could e.g. replace blank by _a, but you also need to take care of your escape character _. To do this, replace every _ by __ (two underscores). You need to scan through the string once and do both replacements simultaneously.
This way, in the resulting text all original underscores will be doubled, and the only other occurence of an underscore will be in the combination _a. You can safely translate this back. Whenever you see an underscore, you need a lookahed of 1 and see what follows. If an a follows, then this was a blank before. If _ follows, then it was an underscore before.
Note that the point is to replace your escape character (_) in the original string, and not the character sequence to which you map the blank. Your idea with replacing _a breaks. as you do not know if _aa was originally _a or a (blank followed by a).
I'm guessing that there is more to this question than appears; for example, that you the strings you are storing must not only be free of spaces, but they must also look like words or some such. You should be clear about your requirements (and you might consider satisfying the curiosity of the spectators by explaining why you need to do such things.)
Edit: As JamesKanze points out in a comment, the following won't work in the case where you can have more than one consecutive space. But I'll leave it here anyway, for historical reference. (I modified it to compress consecutive spaces, so it at least produces unambiguous output.)
std::string out;
char prev = 0;
for (char ch : in) {
if (ch == ' ') {
if (prev != ' ') out.push_back('_');
} else {
if (prev == '_' && ch != '_') out.push_back('_');
out.push_back(ch);
}
prev = ch;
}
if (prev == '_') out.push_back('_');
This seems like a really simple question, but I can't find the answer anywhere. If I'm parsing a file (that includes newline characters) character by character, using
char next = file.get();
will the following check ever be true?
if (next == '\n')
Yes. It gets the next character from the stream. It does not skip newlines or whitespace.
Say I have a CString object strMain="AAAABBCCCCCCDDBBCCCCCCDDDAA";
I also have two smaller strings, say strSmall1="BB";
strSmall2="DD";
Now, I want to replace all occurence of strings which occur between strSmall1("BB") and strSmall2("DD") in strMain, with say "KKKKKKK"
Is there a way to do it without Regex. I cannot use regex as adding another file to the project is prohibited.
Is there a way in VC++/MFC to do it? Or any easy algorithm you can point me to?
int length = strMain.GetLength();
int begin = strMain.Find(strSmall1, 0) + strSmall1.GetLength();
int end = strMain.Find(strSmall2, 0);
CStringT left = strMain.Left(begin);
CStringT right = strMain.Right(length - end);
strMain = left + "KKKKKKK" + right
The easiest way is probably to handle the replacement recursively. Search for the starting delimiter and the ending delimiter. If you find them, put together a new string consisting of the string up to the starting delimiter, followed by the replacement string, followed by the return from recursively doing the replacement in the remainder of the string following the ending delimiter.
That, of course, assumes you want to replace all the occurrences in the main string -- if you only want to replace the first one, John Weldon's solution (for one example) will work quite nicely.
psudocode:
loop over string
if curlocation matches string strsmall1 save index break
loop over remaining string
replace till curlocation matches string strsmall2
Extra credit:
What will the next assignment be?
My answer:
Speed it up by jumping the length of strsmall1 and strsmall2 in loop iterations
I am wanting to create a regular expression for the following scenario:
If a string contains the percentage character (%) then it can only contain the following: %20, and cannot be preceded by another '%'.
So if there was for instance, %25 it would be rejected. For instance, the following string would be valid:
http://www.test.com/?&Name=My%20Name%20Is%20Vader
But these would fail:
http://www.test.com/?&Name=My%20Name%20Is%20VadersAccountant%25
%%%25
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Kyle
EDIT:
The scenario in a nutshell is that a link is written to an encoded state and then launched via JavaScript. No decoding works. I tried .net decoding and JS decoding, each having the same result - The results stay encoded when executed.
Doesn't require a %:
/^[^%]*(%20[^%]*)*$/
Which language are you using?
Most languages have a Uri Encoder / Decoder function or class.
I would suggest you decode the string first and than check for valid (or invalid) characters.
i.e. something like /[\w ]/ (empty is a space)
With a regex in the first place you need to respect that www.example.com/index.html?user=admin&pass=%%250 means that the pass really is "%250".
Another solution if look-arounds are not available:
^([^%]|%([013-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]|2[1-9a-fA-F]))*$
Reject the string if it matches %[^2][^0]
I think that would find what you need
/^([^%]|%%|%20)+$/
Edit: Added case where %% is valid string inside URI
Edit2: And fixed it for case where it should fail :-)
Edit3:
In case you need to use it in editor (which would explain why you can't use more programmatic way), then you have to correctly escape all special characters, for example in Vim that regex should lool:
/^\([^%]\|%%\|%20\)\+$/
Maybe a better approach is to deal with that validation after you decode that string:
string name = HttpUtility.UrlDecode(Request.QueryString["Name"]);
/^([^%]|%20)*$/
This requires a test against the "bad" patterns. If we're allowing %20 - we don't need to make sure it exists.
As others have said before, %% is valid too... and %%25would be %25
The below regex matches anything that doesn't fit into the above rules
/(?<![^%]%)%(?!(20|%))/
The first brackets check whether there is a % before the character (meaning that it's %%) and also checks that it's not %%%. it then checks for a %, and checks whether the item after doesn't match 20
This means that if anything is identified by the regex, then you should probably reject it.
I agree with dominic's comment on the question. Don't use Regex.
If you want to avoid scanning the string twice, you can just iteratively search for % and then check that it is being followed by 20 and nothing else. (Update: allow a % after to be interpreted as a literal %nnn sequence)
// pseudo code
pos = 0
while (pos = mystring.find(pos, '%'))
{
if mystring[pos+1] = "%" then
pos = pos + 2 // ok, this is a literal, skip ahead
else if mystring.substring(pos,2) != "20"
return false; // string is invalid
end if
}
return true;