Erase all occurences of a word from a string [duplicate]

Question

I have a string such as:

AAAbbbbbAAA

I'd like to remove all the occurances of a pattern AAA to get:

bbbbb

The pattern can occur anywhere in the string.

@Linus this is not really a duplicate since he wants to remove the substring and not replace it. so string::erase is here even more adequate. — oo_miguel
– oo_miguel, Commented Nov 2, 2015 at 15:00
@oo_miguel He could just replace AAA with an empty string. Therefore I'd say it is a duplicate. — Linus
– Linus, Commented Nov 2, 2015 at 15:06

oo_miguel · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-02 14:56:19Z

Given:

string yourstring("AAAbbbAAA"); string removestring("AAA");

You could simply run something like this multiple times on your string:

yourstring.erase(yourstring.find(removestring), removestring.length());

Of course you will have to check that string::find actually finds an occurence before using string::erase.

I had heard of replace but wanted to know if there was specificly used for removal. That will do it though.
@Q3SanD yeah right, in your case string::erase is even better. just adapted the answer

Gaston Fontenla Nuñez · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-02 14:56:16Z

Here is the code. It's not very much efficient, but works well, and is a tiny code.

string h = "AAAbbbAAAB"; int pos = h.find("AAA"); while(pos!=-1) { h.replace(pos, 3, ""); pos = h.find("AAA"); } cout << h << endl;

It only works if you know the pattern. If it doesn't what you want, maybe you're looking for a pattern matching algorithm, like KMP.

2 Answers 2