C++ Course Notes | Strings | Week 7

Hello everyone welcome to the weekly lecture notes

Topics to be covered:
Introduction to strings
Indexing of strings
ASCII table
User input string
String vs character array
Commonly used inbuilt functions
Bucket sort and its applications
Stringstream class

What is a String in C++?

A string in C++ is a type of object representing a collection (or sequence) of different characters.
Strings in C++ are a part of the standard string class (std::string). The string class stores the
characters of a string as a collection of bytes in contiguous memory locations.

To use string one must include the header the file #include or the universal header file #include.

Syntax :

string String_Name ;

Example: string str = "pwskills” ;

string subject = “C++”;

Different ways of defining a string:

string str_name = “hello coders”;

string str_name(“physics wallah”);

Indexing of characters in a string:

Let’s assume any string to be pwcoder . The indexing is similar to indexing in an array. It begins with
0 from the very first character and ends with a null character(\0). An extra space is for a null character
after the end of any string.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

p w c o d e r \0

ASCII values:

Each character has an associated integer/numeric value.

For example ‘a’ to ‘z’ ranges from 97 to 122.

Where a has a value 97, b has a value 98, c for 99 and so on.

A -> 65

B ->66

Z->90

There are numeric values for other characters such as #, @, $ etc.

For reference one can check the ascii table for numeric value of any character whose link is provided
as below.

www.cs.cmu.edu
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pattis/15-1XX/common/handouts/ascii.html

Taking string input:

To provide our program’s input from the user, we generally use the cin keyword along with the
extraction operator (>>). By default, the extraction operator considers white space (such as space,
tab, or newline) as the terminating character. So, suppose the user enters "Physics Wallah" as the
input. In that case, only "Physics" will be considered input, and "Wallah" will be discarded.

Let us take a simple example to understand this:

 #include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;

int main() {
string str;

cout << "Enter your string: ";

cin >> str;

// The user input will be stored in the str variable

cout << "You have entered: " << str;

return 0;
}

Output:

Enter your string: pwskills

You have entered: pwskills

In the above example, the user entered "Physics Wallah" in the input. As " " is the terminating
character, anything written after " " was discarded. Hence, we got "Physics" as the output.

To counter this limitation of the extraction operator, we can specify the maximum number of
characters to read from the user's input using the cin.get() function.

getline(cin,str)

Let us take an example to understand this:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
char str[50];

cout << "Enter your string: ";

cin.get(str, 50);

cout << "You have entered: " << str << endl;
return 0;
}

Output:

enter your string: Physics Wallah

You have entered: Physics Wallah

Here we have declared a character array, of maximum size of 50 characters.

We have taken input by writing the statement:

cin.get(str_name , lengthOfString);

String vs. Character Array:

C++ supports both strings and character arrays. Although both help us store data in text form, strings
and character arrays have a lot of differences. Both of them have different use cases. C++ strings are
more commonly used because they can be used with standard operators while character arrays can
not. Let us see the other differences between the two.

Comparison String Character Array

Definition String is a C++ class while the Character array is a collection

string variables are the objects of variables with the data type
of this class char.

Syntax string string_name; char arrayname[array_size];

Access Speed Slow Fast

Indexing To access a particular A character can be accessed

character, we use by its index in the character
"str_name.charAt(index)" or array.
"str[index]".

Operators Standard C++ operators can Standard C++ Operators can

be applied. not be applied.

Memory Allocation Memory is allocated Memory is allocated statically.

dynamically. More memory can More memory can not be
be allocated at run time. allocated at run time.

Commonly used inbuilt string functions:

Reverse() : This function accepts 2 parameters and reverses the string from beginning pointer to
the end pointer.

Syntax: reverse(ptr1 , ptr2) . The first pointer ptr1 is included and the second pointer ptr2 is not
included. That means the string from ptr1 to ptr2 - 1 will be reversed.

Time complexity: let n = ptr2 - ptr1. Therefore time taken by the reverse() function is O(n) where n is
the number of characters involved in the reverse process.

The code showing reverse function is illustrated below:

 #include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
string s;
cout<<"enter your string: ";
cin>>s;
reverse(s.begin() , s.end());
cout<<"The reversed string is: "<<s;
}

Output:

enter your string: PWskills

The reversed string is: slliksWP

substr(): This function is used to generate a substring of a given string.

Syntax: str_name.substr(position , length)

This is the general syntax where we provide the name of the string whose substring is required. The
first parameter indicates the position from where the substring extraction begins, and the second
parameter indicates the length till where you want the substring.

An example illustrating the function is given below:

#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
string s;
cout<<"enter your string: ";
cin>>s;
string str = s.substr(3 , 5);
cout<<"The substring obtained is: "<<str;
}

Output:

enter your string: physicsWallah

The substring obtained is: sicsW

Here we have given the starting index as 3 and want the substring of length 5.

To get a substring after a particular character:

Syntax 2: str_name.substr(position)

As per this syntax, the complete string after the mentioned “position” will be extracted as a substring
as shown below in the example.
 #include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
string s;
cout<<"enter your string: ";
cin>>s;
string str = s.substr(3);
cout<<"The substring obtained is: "<<str;
}

Output:

enter your string: physicswallah

The substring obtained is: sicwallah

Here the complete string after index 3 (including index 3) is obtained as a substring.

To get a substring before any character:

Syntax 3: str_name.substr(0 , end_position)

Here the string from 0 to end_position - 1 is considered as the required substring.

This is a specific case of general syntax.

push_back(): This function is used to push another character or string at the end of the current
string(string with which the function is used/called).

Syntax: str_name.push_back(str2_name)

str2_name string will be pushed at the end of the string str_name as shown in the
following example.

#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
string s;
cout<<"enter your string: ";
cin>>s;
cout<<"enter the new string or character to be pushed: ";
char t;
cin>>t;
s.push_back(t);
cout<<"The new string obtained is: "<<s;
}

Output:

enter your string : physics

enter the new string or character to be pushed: wallah

The new string obtained is: physicswallah

The “+” operator: this is directly used to concatenate 2 strings.

 #include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
string s;
cout<<"enter your string: ";
cin>>s;
cout<<"enter the new string or character to be pushed: ";
string t;
cin>>t;
s += t;
cout<<"The new string obtained is: "<<s;
}

Output:

enter your string : physics

enter the new string or character to be pushed: wallah

The new string obtained is: physicswallah

Here it was written as s+=t that is equivalent to s = s + t, had it been written s = t +s then the resulting
string would be wallahphysics .

When we write s+=t that signifies we are appending the string t at the back of string s.

Statement 2 s = s + t shows we have created a new copy of string s and added string t at the
back of string s.

The only difference in the above two statements is that in the second case extra space will be taken
by the reformation of string s whereas in the first case no such extra space of string s will be
occupied.

Homework: Try t+s functionality on your own.

strcat(): This function is used to concatenate 2 character arrays.

Syntax: strcat(s1_name , s2_name)

This is equivalent to s1_name = s1_name + s2_name as illustrated below:

#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
char s[20];
cout<<"enter your string: ";
cin>>s;
cout<<"enter the new string or character to be pushed: ";
char t[20];
cin>>t;
strcat(s,t);
cout<<"The new string obtained is: "<<s;
}
Output:

enter your string : physics

enter the new string or character to be pushed: wallah

The new string obtained is: physicswallah

size(): this function is used to find the size of the string.

Syntax: str_name.size()

#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
string str;
cin>>str;

cout<<str.size();
}

Output:

pwcoders

Difference between size() and strlen() functions:

size() function is used to know the length of the strings whereas strlen() function is used to know
the length of the character array.
strlen() function takes O(n) time whereas size() function uses O(1) time, where n = length of
the array.
to_string(): This function is used to convert a numeric value into string type.

Syntax:

Suppose n is an integer. To convert this integer to string we have to write the following way:

to_string(n)

This function is used when we have to perform operations on digits of a number. Converting into
string makes the digits accessible in an indexed manner which is quite easy to use.

The following code illustrates:

 #include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
cout<<"enter the number: ";
int n;
cin>>n;
string str = to_string(n);
cout<<str<<endl;
cout<<str[0]<<" "<<str[1]<<" "; //printing the first two digits(from left to
right / highest to lowest priority) of the entered number
}

Output:

3452

Bucket sort on strings:

We have 128 different types of characters available that can be A-Z, a-z, special characters such as !,
@, # etc, digits from ‘0’ to ‘9’etc.

Since the maximum number of characters can be at max 128 we can use an array or vector of size 128
such that each of the index of the array represents a particular character.

Now we can use the ASCII values of the characters to mark the indices of the characters. For
example,

The ASCII value of ‘a’ = 97

‘b’ = 98 and so on. . . . .

So if we created an array ‘arr’ of size 128 then arr[97] will be reserved for the frequency of ‘a’, similarly
arr[98] will be reserved for frequency of ‘b’ and so on.

Once the frequencies of every character are stored we can use it to build a sorted string, because it is
sure that ‘a’ will always be ahead of ‘b’, ‘b’ will always be ahead of ‘c’ and so on. This is the concept of
bucket sort. Below example will clarify this more.

Example , Given a string ‘str’, sort the given string using count sort technique where the string only
contains lowercase alphabetic characters (a - z).
 #include<bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;

string countSort(string str) {

vector<int>arr(26 , 0); //array to store the frequencies of all alphabets
for(int i=0;i<str.size();i++){
arr[str[i] - 'a']++; //storing the required frequencies of particular
character
}
int n = str.size();
int j = 0;
for(int i=0;i<26;i++){
while(arr[i]--){ //iterating till the frequency of a particular
character and appending to the string
str[j++] = i + 'a';
}
}
return str; //returning the sorted string
}
int main()
{ string s;
cout<<"Enter the string: "<<endl;
cin>>s;

Stringstream class :

A stringstream associates a string object with a stream allowing you to read from the string as if it
were a stream (like cin). To use stringstream, we need to include sstream header file. The
stringstream class is extremely useful in parsing input.
 #include<bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;

void print(string str){

stringstream s(str);
string word;
while (s >> word){
cout<<word<<endl;
}
return;
}
int main(){
char s[50];
cout<<"Enter the string : ";
gets(s);
cout<<"Desired output is: "<<endl;
print(s);
return 0;
}

Output:

Enter the string : "PW is a revolution"

Desired output is:

PW

is

revolution