Question

I’m trying to find an elegant way to find some text ex. "hello world" from the sentence "I compiled my first hello world. It works!"

But the sentence is a std::list<word> with some metadata.

Class Word
{
  std::string m_word;
  Location ... (X,Y in a picture)
  ....
}

Just wondering if there is nice way to do that with some std or boost functions rather than my 2 ugly loops. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use std::search together with a custom predicate that only compares the m_word member:

bool wordsEqual(const Word& a, const Word& b) {
    return a.getWord() == b.getWord();
}

// ...
Word needle[] = { "hello", "world" };
list<Word>::iterator it = search(lst.begin(), lst.end(),
                                 needle, needle + 2,
                                 wordsEqual);

This code assumes a getWord method and a constructor Word(const char*) for the array initialization.