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

If you want this, but don't want to go the whole hog and use regexps, and given you're test is for ASCII chars - just create a function to generate the string for find_first_not_of...

#include 
#include 

std::string expand(const char* p)
{
    std::string result;
    while (*p)
        if (p[1] == '-' && p[2])
        {
            for (int c = p[0]; c <= p[2]; ++c)
                result += (char)c;
            p += 3;
        }
        else
            result += *p++;
    return result;
}

int main()
{
    std::cout << expand("A-Za-z0-9_") << '\n';
}