How to replace all occurrences of a character in string?

Question

What is the effective way to replace all occurrences of a character with another character in std::string?

Answer 1

What about Abseil StrReplaceAll? From the header file:

// This file defines `absl::StrReplaceAll()`, a general-purpose string
// replacement function designed for large, arbitrary text substitutions,
// especially on strings which you are receiving from some other system for
// further processing (e.g. processing regular expressions, escaping HTML
// entities, etc.). `StrReplaceAll` is designed to be efficient even when only
// one substitution is being performed, or when substitution is rare.
//
// If the string being modified is known at compile-time, and the substitutions
// vary, `absl::Substitute()` may be a better choice.
//
// Example:
//
// std::string html_escaped = absl::StrReplaceAll(user_input, {
//                                                {"&", "&"},
//                                                {"<", "&lt;"},
//                                                {">", "&gt;"},
//                                                {"\"", "&quot;"},
//                                                {"'", "&#39;"}});

Answer 2

A simple find and replace for a single character would go something like:

s.replace(s.find("x"), 1, "y")

To do this for the whole string, the easy thing to do would be to loop until your s.find starts returning npos. I suppose you could also catch range_error to exit the loop, but that's kinda ugly.

Answer 3

This works! I used something similar to this for a bookstore app, where the inventory was stored in a CSV (like a .dat file). But in the case of a single char, meaning the replacer is only a single char, e.g.'|', it must be in double quotes "|" in order not to throw an invalid conversion const char.

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    int count = 0;  // for the number of occurences.
    // final hold variable of corrected word up to the npos=j
    string holdWord = "";
    // a temp var in order to replace 0 to new npos
    string holdTemp = "";
    // a csv for a an entry in a book store
    string holdLetter = "Big Java 7th Ed,Horstman,978-1118431115,99.85";

    // j = npos
    for (int j = 0; j < holdLetter.length(); j++) {

        if (holdLetter[j] == ',') {

            if ( count == 0 ) 
            {           
                holdWord = holdLetter.replace(j, 1, " | ");      
            }
            else {

                string holdTemp1 = holdLetter.replace(j, 1, " | ");

                // since replacement is three positions in length,
                // must replace new replacement's 0 to npos-3, with
                // the 0 to npos - 3 of the old replacement 
                holdTemp = holdTemp1.replace(0, j-3, holdWord, 0, j-3); 

                holdWord = "";

                holdWord = holdTemp;

            }
            holdTemp = "";
            count++;
        }
    } 
    cout << holdWord << endl;
    return 0;
}

// result:
Big Java 7th Ed | Horstman | 978-1118431115 | 99.85

Uncustomarily I am using CentOS currently, so my compiler version is below . The C++ version (g++), C++98 default:

g++ (GCC) 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-4)
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