Replace substring with another substring C++

Solution 1:

In c++11, you can use std::regex_replace:

#include <string>
#include <regex>

std::string test = "abc def abc def";
test = std::regex_replace(test, std::regex("def"), "klm"); // replace 'def' -> 'klm'
// test = "abc klm abc klm"

Solution 2:

There is no one built-in function in C++ to do this. If you'd like to replace all instances of one substring with another, you can do so by intermixing calls to string::find and string::replace. For example:

size_t index = 0;
while (true) {
     /* Locate the substring to replace. */
     index = str.find("abc", index);
     if (index == std::string::npos) break;

     /* Make the replacement. */
     str.replace(index, 3, "def");

     /* Advance index forward so the next iteration doesn't pick it up as well. */
     index += 3;
}

In the last line of this code, I've incremented index by the length of the string that's been inserted into the string. In this particular example - replacing "abc" with "def" - this is not actually necessary. However, in a more general setting, it is important to skip over the string that's just been replaced. For example, if you want to replace "abc" with "abcabc", without skipping over the newly-replaced string segment, this code would continuously replace parts of the newly-replaced strings until memory was exhausted. Independently, it might be slightly faster to skip past those new characters anyway, since doing so saves some time and effort by the string::find function.

Hope this helps!