Question

This is in a piece of C++ code I am looking through at the moment but I have never seen it before. Can someone tell me what it means? Is it just setting the bool to true if the searchText is found?

size_t startPos = searchString.find("searchText");
bool found = startPos != std::string::npos;

Answer 1

std::string::find() returns the position of the searched substring in the given string or std::string::npos (a constant) if the substring is not found.

Perhaps you would read the code better if it had been written that way:

size_t startPos = searchString.find("searchText");

// In the next line, '(' and ')' are not mandatory, but make this easier to read.
bool found = (startPos != std::string::npos);

That is, if startPos is different from std::string::npos then the substring was found.