Replace part of a string with another string

Question

How do I replace part of a string with another string using the standard C++ libraries?

QString s("hello $name");  // Example using Qt.
s.replace("$name", "Somename");

Answer 1

There's a function to find a substring within a string (find), and a function to replace a particular range in a string with another string (replace), so you can combine those to get the effect you want:

bool replace(std::string& str, const std::string& from, const std::string& to) {
    size_t start_pos = str.find(from);
    if(start_pos == std::string::npos)
        return false;
    str.replace(start_pos, from.length(), to);
    return true;
}

std::string string("hello $name");
replace(string, "$name", "Somename");

---

In response to a comment, I think replaceAll would probably look something like this:

void replaceAll(std::string& str, const std::string& from, const std::string& to) {
    if(from.empty())
        return;
    size_t start_pos = 0;
    while((start_pos = str.find(from, start_pos)) != std::string::npos) {
        str.replace(start_pos, from.length(), to);
        start_pos += to.length(); // In case 'to' contains 'from', like replacing 'x' with 'yx'
    }
}