I see how to tokenise a string in the traditional manner (i.e. this answer here How do I tokenize a string in C++?) but how can I split a string by its tokens, also including them?
For example given a date/time picture such as yyyy\MMM\dd HH:mm:ss, I would like to split into an array with the following:
"yyyy", "\", "MMM", "\", "dd", " " , "HH", ":", "mm", ":", "ss"
The "tokens" are yyyy, MMM, dd, HH, mm, ss in this example. I don't know what the separators are, only what the tokens are. The separators need to appear in the final result however. The complete list of tokens is:
"yyyy" // – four-digit year, e.g. 1996
"yy" // – two-digit year, e.g. 96
"MMMM" // – month spelled out in full, e.g. April
"MMM" // – three-letter abbreviation for month, e.g. Apr
"MM" // – two-digit month, e.g. 04
"M" // – one-digit month for months below 10, e.g. 4
"dd" // – two-digit day, e.g. 02
"d" // – one-digit day for days below 10, e.g. 2
"ss" // - two digit second
"s" // - one-digit second for seconds below 10
"mm" // - two digit minute
"m" // - one-digit minute for minutes below 10
"tt" // - AM/PM designator
"t" // - first character of AM/PM designator
"hh" // - 12 hour two-digit for hours below 10
"h" // - 12 hour one-digit for hours below 10
"HH" // - 24 hour two-digit for hours below 10
"H" // - 24 hour one-digit for hours below 10
I've noticed the standard library std::string isn't very strong on parsing and tokenising and I can't use boost. Is there a tight, idiomatic solution? I'd hate to break out a C-style algorithm for doing this. Performance isn't a consideration.