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Table of Contents

• Code
• Usage example

Here's a small snippet to remove leading or trailing characters from a std::string in C++. I use it to strip leading and trailing zeroes in a game score display function.

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Code

These are the two functions, one to remove leading zeroes and one to remove trailing zeroes:

static void removeTrailingCharacters(std::string &str, const char charToRemove) {
    str.erase (str.find_last_not_of(charToRemove) + 1, std::string::npos );
}

static void removeLeadingCharacters(std::string &str, const char charToRemove) {
    str.erase(0, std::min(str.find_first_not_of(charToRemove), str.size() - 1));
}

Usage example

Example program and output:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

static void removeTrailingCharacters(std::string &str, const char charToRemove) {
    str.erase (str.find_last_not_of(charToRemove) + 1, std::string::npos );
}

static void removeLeadingCharacters(std::string &str, const char charToRemove) {
    str.erase(0, std::min(str.find_first_not_of(charToRemove), str.size() - 1));
}

int main() {
    std::string example1 = "0000abc000";
    std::cout << "before trailing removal: " << example1 << std::endl;
    removeTrailingCharacters(example1, '0');
    std::cout << "after trailing removal:  " << example1 << std::endl;
    std::cout << std::endl;
    std::cout << "before leading removal:  " << example1 << std::endl;
    removeLeadingCharacters(example1, '0');
    std::cout << "after leading removal:   " << example1 << std::endl;

    return 0;
}

Output:

before trailing removal: 0000abc000
after trailing removal:  0000abc

before leading removal:  0000abc
after leading removal:   abc

Tags: c++ , cpp , development , snippets , string