C++ Strings

The basic_string class provides a useful way to manipulate and store sequences of characters. It is defined as a basic template class in the std namespace in the <string> header file.

 template <typename Char, typename Traits = char_traits<Char>, typename Allocator = allocator<Char> >
 class basic_string;

The C++ standard library provides two specializations of class basic_string.

 typedef basic_string<char>    string;
 typedef basic_string<wchar_t> wstring;

In the following sections, string means any specialization of class basic_string, and Char means its character type.

Constructors	create strings from arrays of characters and other strings
Operators	concatenate strings, assign strings, use strings for I/O, compare strings
append	append characters and strings onto a string
assign	give a string values from strings of characters and other C++ strings
at	returns the character at a specific location
begin	returns an iterator to the beginning of the string
c_str	returns a non-modifiable standard C character array version of the string
capacity	returns the number of characters that the string can hold
clear	removes all characters from the string
compare	compares two strings
copy	copies characters from a string into an array
data	returns a pointer to the first character of a string
empty	true if the string has no characters
end	returns an iterator just past the last character of a string
erase	removes characters from a string
find	find characters in the string
find_first_not_of	find first absence of characters
find_first_of	find first occurrence of characters
find_last_not_of	find last absence of characters
find_last_of	find last occurrence of characters
getline	read data from an I/O stream into a string
insert	insert characters into a string
length	returns the length of the string
max_size	returns the maximum number of characters that the string can hold
npos	a special value that indicates “not found” or “all remaining characters”
push_back	add a character to the end of the string
rbegin	returns a reverse_iterator to the end of the string
rend	returns a reverse_iterator to the beginning of the string
replace	replace characters in the string
reserve	sets the minimum capacity of the string
resize	change the size of the string
rfind	find the last occurrence of a substring
size	returns the number of items in the string
substr	returns a certain substring
swap	swap the contents of this string with another