Question

My main function contains a string that I would like to jumble. I have found a piece of code which passes in a char* and returns 0 when complete. I have followed the code providers instructions to simply pass in the string which you would like to have jumbled.

#include <iostream>
#include <string.h>
#include <time.h>
using namespace std;

int scrambleString(char* str)
{
     int x = strlen(str);
     srand(time(NULL));
     for(int y = x; y >=0; y--)
     {
          swap(str[rand()%x],str[y-1]);
     }
     return 0;
}

When I do this, I recieve an error that "no suitable conversion function "std::string" to "char*" exists.

I have also tried passing in a const char* but that won’t allow me to access the word and change it.

Answer 1

Why are you mixing std::string with char*? You should just operate directly on the string:

void scrambleString(std::string& str) 
{
    int x = str.length();
    for(int y = x; y > 0; y--) 
    { 
        int pos = rand()%x;
        char tmp = str[y-1];
        str[y-1] = str[pos];
        str[pos] = tmp;
    }
}

Usage becomes:

    std::string value = "This is a test";
    scrambleString(value);

That being said, std::random_shuffle will do this for you…