How to resolve the algorithm Strip comments from a string step by step in the C++ programming language
How to resolve the algorithm Strip comments from a string step by step in the C++ programming language
Table of Contents
Problem Statement
The task is to remove text that follow any of a set of comment markers, (in these examples either a hash or a semicolon) from a string or input line.
Whitespace debacle: There is some confusion about whether to remove any whitespace from the input line. As of 2 September 2011, at least 8 languages (C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, sed, UNIX Shell) were incorrect, out of 36 total languages, because they did not trim whitespace by 29 March 2011 rules. Some other languages might be incorrect for the same reason. Please discuss this issue at Talk:Strip comments from a string.
The following examples will be truncated to either "apples, pears " or "apples, pears". (This example has flipped between "apples, pears " and "apples, pears" in the past.)
Let's start with the solution:
Step by Step solution about How to resolve the algorithm Strip comments from a string step by step in the C++ programming language
The code snippet you provided reads a string from standard input (the console) and prints the same string, but without any comments.
A comment in C++ is a piece of text that is ignored by the compiler, and it can be used to document the code or to disable code temporarily.
In the code above, there are two functions, strip_white
and strip_comments
, both of which take a string as input and return a string as output.
The function strip_white
removes all the whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, and newlines) from the beginning and end of the input string.
It does this by using the find_first_not_of
and find_last_not_of
functions to find the first and last non-whitespace characters in the string, and then returning the substring that starts at the first non-whitespace character and ends at the last non-whitespace character.
The function strip_comments
removes all the comments from the input string.
It does this by using the find_first_of
function to find the first occurrence of any of the characters in the delimiters
string (in this case, #
or ;
), and then returning the substring that starts at the beginning of the string and ends at the first occurrence of any of the characters in the delimiters
string.
The main function reads a string from standard input (the console) and assigns it to the variable input
.
It then calls the strip_comments
function to remove any comments from the string, using the delimiters
string to specify which characters should be considered as comments.
Finally, it prints the result to standard output (the console).
The code snippet will continue to read strings from standard input and print them without comments until the user enters an empty string (i.e., presses Enter without typing anything).
Source code in the cpp programming language
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
std::string strip_white(const std::string& input)
{
size_t b = input.find_first_not_of(' ');
if (b == std::string::npos) b = 0;
return input.substr(b, input.find_last_not_of(' ') + 1 - b);
}
std::string strip_comments(const std::string& input, const std::string& delimiters)
{
return strip_white(input.substr(0, input.find_first_of(delimiters)));
}
int main( ) {
std::string input;
std::string delimiters("#;");
while ( getline(std::cin, input) && !input.empty() ) {
std::cout << strip_comments(input, delimiters) << std::endl ;
}
return 0;
}
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