Question

I would like to compare a character literal with the first element of string, to check for comments in a file. Why use a char? I want to make this into a function, which accepts a character var for the comment. I don’t want to allow a string because I want to limit it to a single character in length.

With that in mind I assumed the easy way to go would be to address the character and pass it to the std::string’s compare function. However this is giving me unintended results.

My code is as follows:

#include <string>
#include <iostream>

int main ( int argc, char *argv[] )
{
  std::string my_string = "bob";
  char my_char1 = 'a';
  char my_char2 = 'b';

  std::cout << "STRING : " << my_string.substr(0,1) << std::endl
        << "CHAR : " << my_char1 << std::endl;
  if (my_string.substr(0,1).compare(&my_char1)==0)
    std::cout << "WOW!" << std::endl;
  else
    std::cout << "NOPE..." << std::endl;

  std::cout << "STRING : " << my_string.substr(0,1) << std::endl
        << "CHAR : " << my_char2 << std::endl;
  if (my_string.substr(0,1).compare(&my_char2)==0)
    std::cout << "WOW!" << std::endl;
  else
    std::cout << "NOPE..." << std::endl;

  std::cout << "STRING : " << my_string << std::endl
        << "STRING 2 : " << "bob" << std::endl;
  if (my_string.compare("bob")==0)
    std::cout << "WOW!" << std::endl;
  else
    std::cout << "NOPE..." << std::endl;
}

Gives me…

STRING : b
CHAR : a
NOPE...
STRING : b
CHAR : b
NOPE...
STRING : bob
STRING 2 : bob
WOW!

Why does the function think the sub-string and character aren’t the same. What’s the shortest way to properly compare chars and std::string vars?

(a short rant to avoid reclassification of my question…. feel free to skip)
When I say shortest I mean that out of a desire for coding eloquence. Please note, this is NOT a homework question. I am a chemical engineering Ph.D candidate and am coding as part of independent research. One of my last questions was reclassified as “homework” by user msw (who also made a snide remark) when I asked about efficiency, which I considered on the border of abuse. My code may or may not be reused by others, but I’m trying to make it easy to read and maintainable. I also have a bizarre desire to make my code as efficient as possible where possible. Hence the questions on efficiency and eloquence.

Answer 1

Doing this:

  if (my_string.substr(0,1).compare(&my_char2)==0)

Won’t work because you’re “tricking” the string into thinking it’s getting a pointer to a null-terminated C-string. This will have weird effects up to and including crashing your program. Instead, just use normal equality to compare the first character of the string with my_char:

 if (my_string[0] == my_char)
   // do stuff