How to split a string based on empty/blank lines?

Question

I'm writing a c++ application (Qt Widgets) that is supposed to parse an .srt subtitle file. Each part of the file is separated by an empty line, like this:

1
00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:11,000
[Line]

2
00:00:56,034 --> 00:00:57,492
[Line]
[Another line]

3
00:01:13,676 --> 00:01:15,420
[Line]

Basically, I want to read the entire file to a QString, and split it by empty lines into QString array, each item containing one of those sections like this:

2
00:00:56,034 --> 00:00:57,492
[Line]
[Another line]

However, I cannot figure out how to do this. I tried splitting the string by \r and \n, but that split everything into separate lines, not by empty lines.

This is the routine I had in mind to get the data from the .srt file:

• Read all of the contents of the file to a QString (named something along the lines of content).
• Split the QString by empty lines, and append to a QStringList (named something along the lines of sections).
• For each item in sections, split the second line by the --> identifier, and assign indexes 0 and 1 to QString variables called startTime, and endTime, respectively.
• Take the rest of the lines (everything after line 2 is the subtitle text), and append them to a QString called subtitleText.
• Add all the gathered information to an SrtSubtitle instance, and append it to QList<SrtSubtitle>

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

I would improve upon ziarra's answer. You certainly want the solution to be robust and work also with Windows line endings which are "\r\n" instead of "\n". In that case ziarra's solution would not suffice.

So my proposal is to do it in two steps:

1. replace all occurrences of "\r\n" with "\n"
2. split the text by "\n\n" (as ziarra suggests)

Answer 2

New lines are usually represented as \n.

To split the string when there are 2 new lines without anything between them, you can use \n\n as delimiter.