I wanted to extract the values from the string in C++. I guess this is not the C++ way of doing this, but that one in particular doesn't work. Any ideas?
string line = "{10}{20}Hello World!"; int start; int end; string text; // What to use here? Is the sscanf() a good idea? How to implement it? cout << start; // 10 cout << end; // 20 cout << text; // Hello World! Although you can make sscanf work, this solution is more appropriate for C programs. In C++ you should prefer string stream:
string s("{10}{20}Hello World!"); stringstream iss(s); Now you can use the familiar stream operations for reading input into integers and strings:
string a; int x, y; iss.ignore(1, '{'); iss >> x; iss.ignore(1, '}'); iss.ignore(1, '{'); iss >> y; iss.ignore(1, '}'); getline(iss, a); 
You could use the method String.find() to get the positions of '{' and '}' and then extract the data you want through String.substr().
Solution using Regular Expressions:
#include <iostream> #include <regex> std::string line = "{10}{20}Hello World!"; // Regular expression, that contains 3 match groups: int, int, and anything std::regex matcher("\\{(\\d+)\\}\\{(\\d+)\\}(.+)"); std::smatch match; if (!std::regex_search(line, match, matcher)) { throw std::runtime_error("Failed to match expected format."); } int start = std::stoi(match[1]); int end = std::stoi(match[2]); std::string text = match[3]; text does not need to have an "&" in front of it inside the sscanf, since string names are already pointers to their starting address.
sscanf(line, "{%d}{%d}%s", &start, &end, text); 
std::cinand string streams