The easiest way (offering something near what you wrote) is to use Boost.Regex, specifically regex_replace.
std::string has built in find() and replace() methods, but they are more cumbersome to work with as they require dealing with indices and string lengths.
I believe this would work.
It takes const char*'s as a parameter.
//params find and replace cannot be NULL
void FindAndReplace( std::string& source, const char* find, const char* replace )
{
//ASSERT(find != NULL);
//ASSERT(replace != NULL);
size_t findLen = strlen(find);
size_t replaceLen = strlen(replace);
size_t pos = 0;
//search for the next occurrence of find within source
while ((pos = source.find(find, pos)) != std::string::npos)
{
//replace the found string with the replacement
source.replace( pos, findLen, replace );
//the next line keeps you from searching your replace string,
//so your could replace "hello" with "hello world"
//and not have it blow chunks.
pos += replaceLen;
}
}
#include <boost/algorithm/string.hpp> // include Boost, a C++ library
...
std::string target("Would you like a foo of chocolate. Two foos of chocolate?");
boost::replace_all(target, "foo", "bar");
// Replace all occurrences of searchStr in str with replacer
// Each match is replaced only once to prevent an infinite loop
// The algorithm iterates once over the input and only concatenates
// to the output, so it should be reasonably efficient
std::string replace(const std::string& str, const std::string& searchStr,
const std::string& replacer)
{
// Prevent an infinite loop if the input is empty
if (searchStr == "") {
return str;
}
std::string result = "";
size_t pos = 0;
size_t pos2 = str.find(searchStr, pos);
while (pos2 != std::string::npos) {
result += str.substr(pos, pos2-pos) + replacer;
pos = pos2 + searchStr.length();
pos2 = str.find(searchStr, pos);
}
result += str.substr(pos, str.length()-pos);
return result;
}
Many other answers repeatedly call std::string::replace, which requires the string to be overwritten repeatedly, which results in poor performance. In contrast, this uses a std::string buffer so that each character of the string is only traversed once:
Note: Previous versions of this answer used std::ostringstream, which has some overhead. The latest version uses std::string::append instead, as recommended by @LouisGo.