Thread: How come I can't compare a string token?

I made this program that tokenizes a date based on the "/" character. However, the test string below the if statment is never executed. How come? There are two 12's in my date, it should print out the test string twice.

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <cstring>
using namespace std;

void checkDate( char * );
                

int main(){
    
    char date[] = "12/12/2005";
    checkDate( date );
    
    return 0;
}

void checkDate( char * x ){
     char * token;
     char test[] = "12";
     token = strtok( x, "/" );
     
     while( token != NULL ){
            cout << token << endl;
            if( token == test )
                cout << "this is a test string" << endl; // how come I don't see this output???
            token = strtok( NULL, "/" );
     }
}

You cannot compare C style strings with ==. You should probably switch to the string class if you are using C++. If you want to/have to use C style strings, compare them with strcmp.

Is it possible to tokenize string classes based on a delimiting character? How would I go about doing this?

You could use an existing tokenizer (I think Boost has one), or you can use a combination of find and substr. If you have more than one delimiter, find_first_of or find_first_not_of is more appropriate than find itself. Just run it in a loop while the result of find is not string::npos, and remember to start from the last place you left off and you can get each token.

There are probably a few examples if you search these forums.

And the stringstream will work if you have only a single character delimiter to use with getline.