How can I check if a string has special characters in C++ effectively?

Question

I am trying to find if there is better way to check if the string has special characters. In my case, anything other than alphanumeric and a \'_\' is considered a special charac

Answer 1

There's no way using standard C or C++ to do that using character ranges, you have to list out all of the characters. For C strings, you can use strspn(3) and strcspn(3) to find the first character in a string that is a member of or is not a member of a given character set. For example:

// Test if the given string has anything not in A-Za-z0-9_
bool HasSpecialCharacters(const char *str)
{
    return str[strspn(str, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_")] != 0;
}

For C++ strings, you can equivalently use the find_first_of and find_first_not_of member functions.

Another option is to use the isalnum(3) and related functions from the to test if a given character is alphanumeric or not; note that these functions are locale-dependent, so their behavior can (and does) change in other locales. If you do not want that behavior, then don't use them. If you do choose to use them, you'll have to also test for underscores separately, since there's no function that tests "alphabetic, numeric, or underscore", and you'll also have to code your own loop to search the string (or use std::find with an appropriate function object).