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patterncppCritical

Remove spaces from std::string in C++

Submitted by: @import:stackoverflow-api··
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fromstdremovespacesstring

Problem

What is the preferred way to remove spaces from a string in C++? I could loop through all the characters and build a new string, but is there a better way?

Solution

The best thing to do is to use the algorithm remove_if and isspace:

remove_if(str.begin(), str.end(), isspace);


Now the algorithm itself can't change the container(only modify the values), so it actually shuffles the values around and returns a pointer to where the end now should be. So we have to call string::erase to actually modify the length of the container:

str.erase(remove_if(str.begin(), str.end(), isspace), str.end());


We should also note that remove_if will make at most one copy of the data. Here is a sample implementation:

template
T remove_if(T beg, T end, P pred)
{
    T dest = beg;
    for (T itr = beg;itr != end; ++itr)
        if (!pred(*itr))
            *(dest++) = *itr;
    return dest;
}

Code Snippets

remove_if(str.begin(), str.end(), isspace);
str.erase(remove_if(str.begin(), str.end(), isspace), str.end());
template<typename T, typename P>
T remove_if(T beg, T end, P pred)
{
    T dest = beg;
    for (T itr = beg;itr != end; ++itr)
        if (!pred(*itr))
            *(dest++) = *itr;
    return dest;
}

Context

Stack Overflow Q#83439, score: 316

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