howto parse a path to a vector using c++ - c++

Question

I need to parse the path part of a URL for a "router" as part of a REST web service. I'm using the PION library for handling HTTP requests. This library does not seem to have any functionality for retrieving parts of the URL path - or so it seems. I cannot find another library that does this. http://www.w3.org/Library/src/HTParse.c does not give parts of the path for example.
Is there a quicker, more robust way of doing this:
std::vector<std::string> parsePath(std::string path)
{
std::string delimiter = "/";
std::string part = "";
std::size_t firstPos = 0;
std::size_t secondPos = 0;
std::vector<std::string> parts;
while (firstPos != std::string::npos)
{
firstPos = path.find(delimiter, firstPos);
secondPos = path.find(delimiter, firstPos + 1);
part = path.substr(firstPos + 1, (secondPos - 1) - firstPos);
if (part != "") parts.push_back(part);
firstPos = secondPos;
}
return parts;
}

Answer 1

If you have the freedom to use Boost, the easiest way to parse filesystem paths would be to use the filesystem library, which has the advantage of being platform-independent and handling both POSIX and Windows path variants:
boost::filesystem::path p1("/usr/local/bin");
boost::filesystem::path p2("c:\\");
std::cout << p1.filename() << std::endl; // prints "bin"
std::cout << p1.parent_path() << std::endl; // prints "/usr/local"
To iterate through each element of the path, you can use a path iterator:
for (auto const& element : p1)
std::cout << element << std::endl;
prints
"/"
"usr"
"local"
"bin"
Without Boost, choose one of the many ways to parse a delimited string.