Elegantly removing the part of a string after the last occurrence of a character

Question

Suppose I want to remove everything after the last '*' (for example) in a string. Knowing that I can take the following for granted for that string:

1. It will ALWAYS contain a '*'
2. It MAY contain more than one '*'
3. It will NEVER start or end with a '*'

What is the cleanest and/or shortest way to remove everything past the last '*', plus itself, with only basic libraries?

Answer 1

Given your assumptions:

s.erase(s.rfind('*'));

Without the assumption that it contains at least one *:

auto pos = s.rfind('*');
if (pos != std::string::npos) {
    s.erase(pos);
}