Index of nth Occurrence of the string

For this you can use std::string::find and keep track of the returned position. While doing this you can check to see if the desired string is not found as well and return a -1.

#include <string>

int nthOccurrence(const std::string& str, const std::string& findMe, int nth)
{
    size_t  pos = 0;
    int     cnt = 0;

    while( cnt != nth )
    {
        pos+=1;
        pos = str.find(findMe, pos);
        if ( pos == std::string::npos )
            return -1;
        cnt++;
    }
    return pos;
}

You can use the following function

#include <string.h>

int strpos(char *haystack, char *needle, int nth)
{
    char *res = haystack;
    for(int i = 1; i <= nth; i++)
    {
        res = strstr(res, needle);
        if (!res)
            return -1;
        else if(i != nth)
            res++;
    }
    return res - haystack;
}

Returns -1 if it can not find the nth occurrence.

There is a find_nth template function in Boost: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_54_0/doc/html/boost/algorithm/find_nth.html

#include <iostream>
#include <boost/algorithm/string/find.hpp>

using namespace std;
using namespace boost;

int main() {

    string a = "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain";

    iterator_range<string::iterator> r = find_nth(a, "ain", 2);
    cout << std::distance(a.begin(), r.begin()) << endl;

    return 0;
}