C++ Remove punctuation from String

POW already has a good answer if you need the result as a new string. This answer is how to handle it if you want an in-place update.

The first part of the recipe is std::remove_if, which can remove the punctuation efficiently, packing all the non-punctuation as it goes.

std::remove_if (text.begin (), text.end (), ispunct)

Unfortunately, std::remove_if doesn't shrink the string to the new size. It can't because it has no access to the container itself. Therefore, there's junk characters left in the string after the packed result.

To handle this, std::remove_if returns an iterator that indicates the part of the string that's still needed. This can be used with strings erase method, leading to the following idiom...

text.erase (std::remove_if (text.begin (), text.end (), ispunct), text.end ());

I call this an idiom because it's a common technique that works in many situations. Other types than string provide suitable erase methods, and std::remove (and probably some other algorithm library functions I've forgotten for the moment) take this approach of closing the gaps for items they remove, but leaving the container-resizing to the caller.

Using algorithm remove_copy_if :-

string text,result;
std::remove_copy_if(text.begin(), text.end(),            
                        std::back_inserter(result), //Store output           
                        std::ptr_fun<int, int>(&std::ispunct)  
                       );