Stripping specified character

Question

Here's some code that removes the specified character, ch, from the string passed in. Is there a better way to do this? Specifically, one that's more efficient and/or portable?

//returns string without any 'ch' characters in it, if any.
#include <string>
using namespace std;
string strip(string str, const char ch)
{
        size_t p = 0; //position of any 'ch'

        while ((p = str.find(ch, p)) != string::npos)
                str.erase(p, 1);

        return str;
}

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure how the performance will compare, but the standard way to accomplish this would be the erase-remove idiom:

str.erase(std::remove(str.begin(). str.end(), ch), str.end());

Unless the performance proves to be a bottleneck, it's typically better to stick with the C++ style of doing things. I can't imagine that this would be significantly less efficient than the other method. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a bit faster for long strings with a high amount of the removed character -- though my assumption of that depends on quite a few non-guaranteed implementation choices, and a rather rough estimation of the cost of different low level operations.)

Answer 2

My way (probably sloppy/inefficient ):

std::string StripCharacter( __in std::string StdString, __in const char Character )
{
    std::string Result = "";
    for( unsigned int Index = 0; Index != StdString.length( ); ++ Index )
        if( StdString[ Index ] != Character )
            Result += StdString[ Index ];
    return ( Result );
}

or...

std::string StripCharacter( __in std::string StdString,
                            __in const char Character,
                            __in unsigned int Start,
                            __in unsigned int End )
{
    if( Start >= End )
        return ( StdString );

    std::string Result = "";

    if( Start > 0 )
        Result += StdString.substr( 0, Start );

    for( unsigned int Index = Start; Index != End; ++ Index )
        if( StdString[ Index ] != Character )
            Result += StdString[ Index ];

    if( End < StdString.length( ) )
        Result += StdString.substr( End, StdString.length( ) - End );

    return ( Result );
}