Debug my reimplementation of strtok and split - c++

Question

I'm supposed to be writing code that takes a string of comma separated values without spaces (ex. my,name,is,jack). First we had to write a function
string nextstring(string str, int start_index)
that returns a single "value" from your initial string depending on the start index. The second part of the problem was to write a function
int split(string str, string a[], int max_size)
that will identify all the values in the initial string and put them in a string array and then return the total number of values stored in the array; i.e. if you had initially input my,name,is it would return 3.
My function never returns the correct value and whatever it returns changes depending on what the length of the words are.
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
string nextstring(string str, int start_index);
int split(string str, string a[], int max_size);
int main()
{
string str;
int cnt;
string a[100];
cout<< "what is your string" << endl;
getline(cin, str);
cnt= split(str, a, 100);
cout << "There are " << cnt << " values in this string" << endl;
for(int i=0; i<cnt; i++)
{
cout << a[i] << endl;
}
return 0;
}
string nextstring(string str, int start_index)
{
string ans;
if(str[start_index] == ',' || str[start_index] == '\0')
{
ans=" ";
}
else{
ans=str[start_index]+nextstring(str, start_index+1);
}
return ans;
}
int split(string str, string a[], int max_size)
{
int j=0;
int ans=0;
double k=0;
while(j<max_size)
{
a[j]= nextstring(str,k);
string check=a[j];
if(isalpha(check[0])!= 0)
{
ans++;
}
k=k+a[j].length();
j++;
}
return ans;
}

Answer 1

It seems that your problem is that while(j<max_size){...} leads to j being incremented up to max_size. The line a[j]= nextstring(str,k); is at some points reading values that are outside your string which is really bad!
Replacing while(j<max_size){...} by while(j<max_size && k<str.length()){...} seems to be enough to make your code work!
Apart from that:
k has no reason to be a double! It should be an int (or something similar).
Since you are already using string, you should also learn to use vector. split is better written as:
int split(string str, vector<string> &a, int max_size)
{
int ans=0;
int k=0;
while(k<str.length())
{
string next = nextstring(str,k);
if(isalpha(next[0])!= 0)
{
ans++;
a.append(next);
}
k += next.length();
}
return ans;
}

Answer 2

The problem in your approach is to identify the end of the string, as there is no null terminator in a c++ string. Consider to update nextstring() to look for the end of string in a different manner:
string nextstring(string str, int start_index)
{
...
if(start_index == str.size() || str[start_index] == ',' ) //<===
{
ans=" ";
}
...
}
online demo
Additional recommendation
Note that it is not very nice to return a blank string when in reality it should be empty to reflect its real value (e.g. ",,"). You have no choice because otherwise you would have no mean in the calling function, to determine that the end of string was reached. But the consequence is thar all your strings have a trailing blank.
When you call recursively the function adding char to build the return string, you risk to have a considerable overhead. You could consider avoiding this, by replacing the else part:
ans=str.substr(start_index, str.find(',', start_index+1)-start_index);
However, as you have no trailing blank anymore, you need to adapt split() so to adapt its way to count the total number of chars parsed:
k=k+a[j].length()+1; // +1 because there's no longer a trailing blank.
Online demo