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swiftstring

Swift: Find all occurrences of a substring


I have an extension of the String class in Swift that returns the index of the first letter of a given substring.

Can anybody please help me make it so it will return an array of all occurrences instead of just the first one?

extension String {
    func indexOf(string : String) -> Int {
        var index = -1
        if let range = self.range(of : string) {
            if !range.isEmpty {
                index = distance(from : self.startIndex, to : range.lowerBound)
            }
        }
        return index
    }
}

For example instead of a return value of 50 I would like something like [50, 74, 91, 103]


Solution

  • You just keep advancing the search range until you can't find any more instances of the substring:

    extension String {
        func indicesOf(string: String) -> [Int] {
            var indices = [Int]()
            var searchStartIndex = self.startIndex
    
            while searchStartIndex < self.endIndex,
                let range = self.range(of: string, range: searchStartIndex..<self.endIndex),
                !range.isEmpty
            {
                let index = distance(from: self.startIndex, to: range.lowerBound)
                indices.append(index)
                searchStartIndex = range.upperBound
            }
    
            return indices
        }
    }
    
    let keyword = "a"
    let html = "aaaa"
    let indicies = html.indicesOf(string: keyword)
    print(indicies) // [0, 1, 2, 3]