How do you reverse a string in place in C or C++?

Question

How do you reverse a string in C or C++ without requiring a separate buffer to hold the reversed string?

Answer 1

You use std::reverse algorithm from the C++ Standard Library.

Answer 2

Reverse a string in place (visualization):

Answer 3

Another C++ way (though I would probably use std::reverse() myself :) as being more expressive and faster)

str = std::string(str.rbegin(), str.rend());

The C way (more or less :) ) and please, be careful about XOR trick for swapping, compilers sometimes cannot optimize that.

In such case it is usually much slower.

char* reverse(char* s)
{
    char* beg = s, *end = s, tmp;
    while (*end) end++;
    while (end-- > beg)
    { 
        tmp  = *beg; 
        *beg++ = *end;  
        *end =  tmp;
    }
    return s;
} // fixed: check history for details, as those are interesting ones

Answer 4

My answer would be similar to most of them, but please find my code here.

//Method signature to reverse string
string reverseString(string str);

int main(void){
    string str;
    getline(cin, str);
    str =  reverseString(str);
    cout << "The reveresed string is : " << str;
    return 0;
}

/// <summary>
///     Reverses the input string.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="str">
///    This is the input string which needs to be reversed.
/// </param>
/// <return datatype = string>
///     This method would return the reversed string
/// </return datatype>

string reverseString(string str){
    int length = str.size()-1;
    char temp;
    for( int i=0 ;i<(length/2);i++)
    {
        temp = str[i];
        str[i] = str[length-i];
        str[length-i] = temp;
    }
    return str;
}

Answer 5

It's been a while and I don't remember which book taught me this algorithm, but I thought it was quite ingenious and simple to understand:

char input[] = "moc.wolfrevokcats";

int length = strlen(input);
int last_pos = length-1;
for(int i = 0; i < length/2; i++)
{
    char tmp = input[i];
    input[i] = input[last_pos - i];
    input[last_pos - i] = tmp;
}

printf("%s\n", input);

Answer 6

#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <string>

void strrev(char *str)
{
        if( str == NULL )
                return;

        char *end_ptr = &str[strlen(str) - 1];
        char temp;
        while( end_ptr > str )
        {
                temp = *str;
                *str++ = *end_ptr;
                *end_ptr-- = temp;
        }
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        char buffer[32];

        strcpy(buffer, "testing");
        strrev(buffer);
        printf("%s\n", buffer);

        strcpy(buffer, "a");
        strrev(buffer);
        printf("%s\n", buffer);

        strcpy(buffer, "abc");
        strrev(buffer);
        printf("%s\n", buffer);

        strcpy(buffer, "");
        strrev(buffer);
        printf("%s\n", buffer);

        strrev(NULL);

        return 0;
}

This code produces this output:

gnitset
a
cba