Question

Say we have 3 string with free text, I need to merge the strings into a single and be able afterwards to retrieve the 3 string individually.

I know this is not clean at all, but there are some situations where you cannot change the interface. Therefore, I am looking for a “pseudo clean” solution.

I was thinking 2 options:
-choose a separator, escape it on the string and just concatenate them with the sep in the middle.
-choose a separator and bytecode in some way the strings and concatenate them bytecoded.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Typically this is done with a zero seperator, as this can never occur in a C string.

So:

string a, b, c = ...;

ostringstream o;
o << a << char(0) << b << char(0) << c;
string s = o.str();

...

auto i = s.find(char(0),0);
a = s.substr(0,i);
auto j = s.find(char(0),i+1);
b = s.substr(i+1, j-i-1);
c = s.substr(j+1);