Question

I’m reading in several documents, and indexing the words I read in. However, I want to ignore common case words (a, an, the, and, is, or, are, etc).

Is there a shortcut to doing this? Moreso than doing just…

if(word==”and” || word==”is” || etc etc….) ignore word;

For example, can I put them into a const string somehow, and have it just check against the string? Not sure… thank you!

Answer 1

Create a set<string> with the words that you would like to exclude, and use mySet.count(word) to determine if the word is in the set. If it is, the count will be 1; it will be 0 otherwise.

#include <iostream>
#include <set>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

int main() {
    const char *words[] = {"a", "an", "the"};
    set<string> wordSet(words, words+3);
    cerr << wordSet.count("the") << endl;
    cerr << wordSet.count("quick") << endl;
    return 0;
}