Question

I have a function that is supposed to find the last bit of a directory in a string. eg:
“C:\Lolcats\pie\ambulance\” should return “ambulance”. However it returns some strange characters ive never seen, like the male arrow-point symbol and some other weird stuff.

string App::getlastName(string cakes){
    //finds the name of the last folder in a directory
    string name;
    string temp;//popback all of temp into name to invert it
    cakes.pop_back();
    char i = cakes[cakes.length()-1];
    while (i != '\\'){
        temp.push_back(cakes[i]);
        cakes.pop_back();
        i = cakes[cakes.length()-1];
    }                           //-1?
    for (int j = 0; j<temp.length(); ++j){
        name.push_back(temp.back());
        temp.pop_back();
    }
    return name;
}

This is probably one of the worst functions i’ve ever written, but I can’t think of how else to wrangle the end off 🙁 Can someone help me please? 😀

Note that the function doesnt need to find the name of a file, it’ll just be folders.

Answer 1

If you remove the trailing \ off the string you can use a simple combination of rfind and substr to get the data you want.

string substring = cakes.substr(cakes.rfind("\\") + 1);