Cleaner way to remove a substring from str in C

Kayla picture Kayla · Jun 3, 2012 · Viewed 13.7k times · Source

I have the following string ID is a sample string remove to /0.10, I would like to end up with the following: ID/0.10.

This is what I came up with. However, I'm looking for a cleaner/nicer way of doing this.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main ()
{
    char str[] = "ID is a sample string remove to /0.10";
    char *a = strstr(str, "ID");
    char *b = strrchr (str, '/');
    if (a == NULL)
        return 0;
    if (b == NULL)
        return 0;

    int p1 = a-str+2;
    int p2 = b-str;
    int remL = p2 - p1;
    int until = (strlen(str) - p1 - remL) +1;

    memmove (str+p1, str+(p1+remL), until);
    printf ("%s\n",str);
    return 0;
}

Answer

sth picture sth · Jun 3, 2012

After determining a and b you can simplify the memmove like this:

char str[] = "ID is a sample string remove to /0.10";
char *a = strstr(str, "ID");
char *b = strrchr (str, '/');
if ((a == NULL) || (b == NULL) || (b < a))
    return 0;

memmove(a+2, b, strlen(b)+1);

The calculations you do on the string lengths are not really necessary.