Finding all occurrences of a character in a string

Question

I have comma delimited strings I need to pull values from. The problem is these strings will never be a fixed size. So I decided to iterate through the groups of commas and read what is in between. In order to do that I made a function that returns every occurrence's position in a sample string.

Is this a smart way to do it? Is this considered bad code?

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <Windows.h>

using namespace std;

vector<int> findLocation(string sample, char findIt);

int main()
{
    string test = "19,,112456.0,a,34656";
    char findIt = ',';

    vector<int> results = findLocation(test,findIt);
    return 0;
}

vector<int> findLocation(string sample, char findIt)
{
    vector<int> characterLocations;
    for(int i =0; i < sample.size(); i++)
        if(sample[i] == findIt)
            characterLocations.push_back(sample[i]);

    return characterLocations;
}

Answer 1

vector<int> findLocation(string sample, char findIt)
{
    vector<int> characterLocations;
    for(int i =0; i < sample.size(); i++)
        if(sample[i] == findIt)
            characterLocations.push_back(sample[i]);

    return characterLocations;
}

As currently written, this will simply return a vector containing the int representations of the characters themselves, not their positions, which is what you really want, if I read your question correctly.

Replace this line:

characterLocations.push_back(sample[i]);

with this line:

characterLocations.push_back(i);

And that should give you the vector you want.