How to split a string by emojis in C++

Question

I'm trying to take a string of emojis and split them into a vector of each emoji

Given the string:

std::string emojis = "😀🔍🦑😁🔍🎉😂🤣";

I'm trying to get:

std::vector<std::string> splitted_emojis = {"😀", "🔍", "🦑", "😁", "🔍", "🎉", "😂", "🤣"};

Edit

I've tried to do:

std::string emojis = "😀🔍🦑😁🔍🎉😂🤣";
std::vector<std::string> splitted_emojis;
size_t pos = 0;
std::string token;
while ((pos = emojis.find("")) != std::string::npos)
{
    token = emojis.substr(0, pos);
    splitted_emojis.push_back(token);
    emojis.erase(0, pos);
}

But it seems like it throws terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc' after a couple of seconds.
When trying to check how many emojis are in a string using:

std::string emojis = "😀🔍🦑😁🔍🎉😂🤣";
std::cout << emojis.size() << std::endl; // returns 32

it returns a bigger number which i assume are the unicode data. I don't know too much about unicode data but i'm trying to figure out how to check for when the data of an emoji begins and ends to be able to split the string to each emoji

Answer 1

I would definitely recommend that you use a library with better unicode support (all large frameworks do), but in a pinch you can get by with knowing that the UTF-8 encoding spreads Unicode characters over multiple bytes, and that the first bits of the first byte determine how many bytes a character is made up of.

I stole a function from boost. The split_by_codepoint function uses an iterator over the input string and constructs a new string using the first N bytes (where N is determined by the byte count function) and pushes it to the ret vector.

// Taken from boost internals
inline unsigned utf8_byte_count(uint8_t c)
{
  // if the most significant bit with a zero in it is in position
  // 8-N then there are N bytes in this UTF-8 sequence:
  uint8_t mask = 0x80u;
  unsigned result = 0;
  while(c & mask)
  {
    ++result;
    mask >>= 1;
  }
  return (result == 0) ? 1 : ((result > 4) ? 4 : result);
}

std::vector<std::string> split_by_codepoint(std::string input) {
  std::vector<std::string> ret;
  auto it = input.cbegin();
  while (it != input.cend()) {
    uint8_t count = utf8_byte_count(*it);
    ret.emplace_back(std::string{it, it+count});
    it += count;
  }
  return ret;
}

int main() {
    std::string emojis = u8"😀🔍🦑😁🔍🎉😂🤣";
    auto split = split_by_codepoint(emojis);
    std::cout << split.size() << std::endl;
}

Note that this function simply splits a string into UTF-8 strings containing one code point each. Determining if the character is an emoji is left as an exercise: UTF-8-decode any 4-byte characters and see if they are in the proper range.