Tip of the Week #10: Splitting Strings, not Hairs

Originally published as totw/10 on 2012-08-16

By Greg Miller ([email protected])

Updated 2018-01-24

I tend to have an odd split in my mind. –John Cleese

Splitting a string into substrings is a common task in any general-purpose programming language, and C++ is no exception. When the need arose at Google, many engineers found themselves wading through a morass of splitting functions in organically grown header files. You’d have hunted for the magical combination of input parameters, output parameters, and semantics that satisfies your need. After studying 50+ functions in a 600+ line header, you may have finally decided on something as tortuously named as SplitStringViewToDequeOfStringAllowEmpty().

To address this, the C++ Library Team implemented a new API for splitting strings, available for use in absl/strings/str_split.h

The new API replaced many of these splitting functions with a single absl::StrSplit() function. This function takes an input string to be split and a delimiter on which to split the string as arguments. absl::StrSplit() adapts the returned collection to the type specified by the caller. absl::StrSplit()’s implementation is efficient because absl::string_views are used internally; no copies are made unless the caller explicitly requests to store the results in a collection of string objects (which copy their data).

Enough talk, let’s see some examples:

// Splits on commas. Stores in vector of string_view (no copies).
std::vector<absl::string_view> v = absl::StrSplit("a,b,c", ',');

// Splits on commas. Stores in vector of string (data copied once).
std::vector<std::string> v = absl::StrSplit("a,b,c", ',');

// Splits on literal string "=>" (not either of "=" or ">")
std::vector<absl::string_view> v = absl::StrSplit("a=>b=>c", "=>");

// Splits on any of the given characters (',' or ';')
using absl::ByAnyChar;
std::vector<std::string> v = absl::StrSplit("a,b;c", ByAnyChar(",;"));

// Stores in various containers (also works w/ absl::string_view)
std::set<std::string> s = absl::StrSplit("a,b,c", ',');
std::multiset<std::string> s = absl::StrSplit("a,b,c", ',');
std::list<std::string> li = absl::StrSplit("a,b,c", ',');

// Equiv. to the mythical SplitStringViewToDequeOfStringAllowEmpty()
std::deque<std::string> d = absl::StrSplit("a,b,c", ',');

// Yields "a"->"1", "b"->"2", "c"->"3"
std::map<std::string, std::string> m = absl::StrSplit("a,1,b,2,c,3", ',');

For more information, take a look at absl/strings/str_split.h for details about how to use the Split API and absl/strings/str_split_test.cc for some more examples.

Thanks for reading. Now I really gotta split…