> We were looking at how to split strings in C++ but didn't find very neat examples that can also handle casting db_and_collection from const char * to std::string at the beginning

The string type has a constructor that takes a `const char *`. http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/string/

> Is there any good resource for C++ String manipulation that we can look at?

From the first page of [Google results](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+split+a+string+in+c%2B%2B):

 * http://www.cplusplus.com/faq/sequences/strings/split/
 * http://stackoverflow.com/questions/236129/how-to-split-a-string-in-c