c++ - member function erase() not working in a loop -

i'm programming little game; stringname.erase() seems not working in 'for-loop' , want understand why, have other alternatives, don't understand what's going on in following code.

more explications of situation (important!):

guess char. 'tmgword' , 'word' of type string, and: tmgword = word ;

what understand code:

in first time,the 'while'-loop verifies if there 'guess' in string 'tmpgword'. true , for-loop working fine, right character(guess) verifies if-condition erased.

in second time: 'while'-loop verifies again if there 'guess' in string 'tmpgword'. true, , hence go 'for-loop' again; , 'if'-block ( right char found ) here erase() don't work, , enter in infinite loop.

when program finds right index using 'for-loop', break, , start search beginning in case there more occurrences of guess.

the problem is: program finds 'guess' again erase() won't delete it!

can explain please. here code:

while (tmpgword.find(guess,0) != string::npos )         {             (i = 0; < word.size(); i++) // verify input;              {                  if (word[i] == guess)                 {                     encword[i] = word[i];//i don't think line important                     tmpgword.erase(tmpgword.begin() + i);                     break;                 }              }         } 

after first erase, character positions in tmpgword not same in word.

string::find() returns position of element when it's found, can use instead of looping through word.

size_t pos = 0; while ((pos = tmpgword.find(guess, pos)) != string::npos) {     tmpgword.erase(pos, 1); } 

i've used pos starting position each call find() starts erased, rather searching beginning each time through (there can't occurrences before that, because they've been erased).