How to replace all occurrences of a character in string?

The question is centered on character replacement, but, as I found this page very useful (especially Konrad's remark), I'd like to share this more generalized implementation, which allows to deal with substrings as well:

std::string ReplaceAll(std::string str, const std::string& from, const std::string& to) {
    size_t start_pos = 0;
    while((start_pos = str.find(from, start_pos)) != std::string::npos) {
        str.replace(start_pos, from.length(), to);
        start_pos += to.length(); // Handles case where 'to' is a substring of 'from'
    }
    return str;
}

Usage:

std::cout << ReplaceAll(string("Number Of Beans"), std::string(" "), std::string("_")) << std::endl;
std::cout << ReplaceAll(string("ghghjghugtghty"), std::string("gh"), std::string("X")) << std::endl;
std::cout << ReplaceAll(string("ghghjghugtghty"), std::string("gh"), std::string("h")) << std::endl;

Outputs:

Number_Of_Beans

XXjXugtXty

hhjhugthty

---

EDIT:

The above can be implemented in a more suitable way, in case performances are of your concern, by returning nothing (void) and performing the changes directly on the string str given as argument, passed by address instead of by value. This would avoid useless and costly copy of the original string, while returning the result. Your call, then...

Code :

static inline void ReplaceAll2(std::string &str, const std::string& from, const std::string& to)
{
    // Same inner code...
    // No return statement
}

---

Hope this will be helpful for some others...

I thought I'd toss in the boost solution as well:

#include <boost/algorithm/string/replace.hpp>

// in place
std::string in_place = "blah#blah";
boost::replace_all(in_place, "#", "@");

// copy
const std::string input = "blah#blah";
std::string output = boost::replace_all_copy(input, "#", "@");

Imagine a large binary blob where all 0x00 bytes shall be replaced by "\1\x30" and all 0x01 bytes by "\1\x31" because the transport protocol allows no \0-bytes.

In cases where:

• the replacing and the to-replaced string have different lengths,
• there are many occurences of the to-replaced string within the source string and
• the source string is large,

the provided solutions cannot be applied (because they replace only single characters) or have a performance problem, because they would call string::replace several times which generates copies of the size of the blob over and over. (I do not know the boost solution, maybe it is OK from that perspective)

This one walks along all occurrences in the source string and builds the new string piece by piece once:

void replaceAll(std::string& source, const std::string& from, const std::string& to)
{
    std::string newString;
    newString.reserve(source.length());  // avoids a few memory allocations

    std::string::size_type lastPos = 0;
    std::string::size_type findPos;

    while(std::string::npos != (findPos = source.find(from, lastPos)))
    {
        newString.append(source, lastPos, findPos - lastPos);
        newString += to;
        lastPos = findPos + from.length();
    }

    // Care for the rest after last occurrence
    newString += source.substr(lastPos);

    source.swap(newString);
}

std::string doesn't contain such function but you could use stand-alone replace function from algorithm header.

#include <algorithm>
#include <string>

void some_func() {
  std::string s = "example string";
  std::replace( s.begin(), s.end(), 'x', 'y'); // replace all 'x' to 'y'
}