Remove extra white spaces in C++
Since you use C++, you can take advantage of standard-library features designed for that sort of work. You could use std::string
(instead of char[0x255]
) and std::istringstream
, which will replace most of the pointer arithmetic.
First, make a string stream:
std::istringstream stream(input);
Then, read strings from it. It will remove the whitespace delimiters automatically:
std::string word;
while (stream >> word)
{
...
}
Inside the loop, build your output string:
if (!output.empty()) // special case: no space before first word
output += ' ';
output += word;
A disadvantage of this method is that it allocates memory dynamically (including several reallocations, performed when the output string grows).
Here's a simple, non-C++11 solution, using the same remove_extra_whitespace()
signature as in the question:
#include <cstdio>
void remove_extra_whitespaces(char* input, char* output)
{
int inputIndex = 0;
int outputIndex = 0;
while(input[inputIndex] != '\0')
{
output[outputIndex] = input[inputIndex];
if(input[inputIndex] == ' ')
{
while(input[inputIndex + 1] == ' ')
{
// skip over any extra spaces
inputIndex++;
}
}
outputIndex++;
inputIndex++;
}
// null-terminate output
output[outputIndex] = '\0';
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
char input[0x255] = "asfa sas f f dgdgd dg ggg";
char output[0x255] = "NO_OUTPUT_YET";
remove_extra_whitespaces(input,output);
printf("input: %s\noutput: %s\n", input, output);
return 1;
}
Output:
input: asfa sas f f dgdgd dg ggg
output: asfa sas f f dgdgd dg ggg
There are already plenty of nice solutions. I propose you an alternative based on a dedicated <algorithm>
meant to avoid consecutive duplicates: unique_copy()
:
void remove_extra_whitespaces(const string &input, string &output)
{
output.clear(); // unless you want to add at the end of existing sring...
unique_copy (input.begin(), input.end(), back_insert_iterator<string>(output),
[](char a,char b){ return isspace(a) && isspace(b);});
cout << output<<endl;
}
Here is a live demo. Note that I changed from c style strings to the safer and more powerful C++ strings.
Edit: if keeping c-style strings is required in your code, you could use almost the same code but with pointers instead of iterators. That's the magic of C++. Here is another live demo.
There are plenty of ways of doing this (e.g., using regular expressions), but one way you could do this is using std::copy_if
with a stateful functor remembering whether the last character was a space:
#include <algorithm>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
struct if_not_prev_space
{
// Is last encountered character space.
bool m_is = false;
bool operator()(const char c)
{
// Copy if last was not space, or current is not space.
const bool ret = !m_is || c != ' ';
m_is = c == ' ';
return ret;
}
};
int main()
{
const std::string s("abc sssd g g sdg gg gf into abc sssd g g sdg gg gf");
std::string o;
std::copy_if(std::begin(s), std::end(s), std::back_inserter(o), if_not_prev_space());
std::cout << o << std::endl;
}