Question

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comparing two strings with comma seperated values

I am working in C++, where I have two strings:

string str1 = "1,4,8,",
       str2 = "4,1,8,";

Both strings contains comma separated values. Now I just want to check whether all the elements in str1 also exist in str2, regardless of their position. Is there any direct way to check this? Do I need to write custom code for this?

Answer 1

As far as C++ is concerned, those strings are just sequences of characters. If you apply meaning to those characters (such as “comma separated values”), then you’ll have to write some code to extract the data and deal with it.

I would do something like:

• split the string on ‘,’
• convert each sequence of digits into an integer (skipping over empty elements)
• insert those integers into a set (one for each input string)
• compare the sets

It’s up to you to determine what kind of integer to use.