[c++] How to find substring from string?

How do I find a substring from the string path "/user/desktop/abc/post/" using C/C++? I want to check if folder "abc" is present or not in that path.

Path is character pointer char *ptr = "/user/desktop/abc/post/";

This question is related to c++ c

The answer is


In C, use the strstr() standard library function:

const char *str = "/user/desktop/abc/post/";
const int exists = strstr(str, "/abc/") != NULL;

Take care to not accidentally find a too-short substring (this is what the starting and ending slashes are for).


As user1511510 has identified, there's an unusual case when abc is at the end of the file name. We need to look for either /abc/ or /abc followed by a string-terminator '\0'. A naive way to do this would be to check if either /abc/ or /abc\0 are substrings:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main() {
    const char *str = "/user/desktop/abc";
    const int exists = strstr(str, "/abc/") || strstr(str, "/abc\0");
    printf("%d\n",exists);
    return 0;
}

but exists will be 1 even if abc is not followed by a null-terminator. This is because the string literal "/abc\0" is equivalent to "/abc". A better approach is to test if /abc is a substring, and then see if the character after this substring (indexed using the pointer returned by strstr()) is either a / or a '\0':

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main() {
    const char *str = "/user/desktop/abc", *substr;
    const int exists = (substr = strstr(str, "/abc")) && (substr[4] == '\0' || substr[4] == '/');
    printf("%d\n",exists);
    return 0;
}

This should work in all cases.


If you are utilizing arrays too much then you should include cstring.h because it has too many functions including finding substrings.


Use strstr(const char *s , const char *t) and include<string.h>

You can write your own function which behaves same as strstr and you can modify according to your requirement also

char * str_str(const char *s, const char *t)
{
int i, j, k;
for (i = 0; s[i] != '\0'; i++) 
{
for (j=i, k=0; t[k]!='\0' && s[j]==t[k]; j++, k++);
if (k > 0 && t[k] == '\0')
return (&s[i]);
}
return NULL;
}

Use std::string and find.

std::string str = "/user/desktop/abc/post/";
bool exists = str.find("/abc/") != std::string::npos;

In C++

using namespace std;

string my_string {"Hello world"};
string element_to_be_found {"Hello"};

if(my_string.find(element_to_be_found)!=string::npos)
   std::cout<<"Element Found"<<std::endl;

Example using std::string find method:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

int main (){
    std::string str ("There are two needles in this haystack with needles.");
    std::string str2 ("needle");

    size_t found = str.find(str2);
    if(found!=std::string::npos){ 
        std::cout << "first 'needle' found at: " << found << '\n';
    }

    return 0;
}

Result:

first 'needle' found at: 14.