Regular expressions in C: examples?

Question

I\'m after some simple examples and best practices of how to use regular expressions in ANSI C. man regex.h does not provide that much help.

Answer 1

While the answer above is good, I recommend using PCRE2. This means you can literally use all the regex examples out there now and not have to translate from some ancient regex.

I made an answer for this already, but I think it can help here too..

Regex In C To Search For Credit Card Numbers

// YOU MUST SPECIFY THE UNIT WIDTH BEFORE THE INCLUDE OF THE pcre.h

#define PCRE2_CODE_UNIT_WIDTH 8
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

int main(){

bool Debug = true;
bool Found = false;
pcre2_code *re;
PCRE2_SPTR pattern;
PCRE2_SPTR subject;
int errornumber;
int i;
int rc;
PCRE2_SIZE erroroffset;
PCRE2_SIZE *ovector;
size_t subject_length;
pcre2_match_data *match_data;


char * RegexStr = "(?:\\D|^)(5[1-5][0-9]{2}(?:\\ |\\-|)[0-9]{4}(?:\\ |\\-|)[0-9]{4}(?:\\ |\\-|)[0-9]{4})(?:\\D|$)";
char * source = "5111 2222 3333 4444";

pattern = (PCRE2_SPTR)RegexStr;// <<<<< This is where you pass your REGEX 
subject = (PCRE2_SPTR)source;// <<<<< This is where you pass your bufer that will be checked. 
subject_length = strlen((char *)subject);




  re = pcre2_compile(
  pattern,               /* the pattern */
  PCRE2_ZERO_TERMINATED, /* indicates pattern is zero-terminated */
  0,                     /* default options */
  &errornumber,          /* for error number */
  &erroroffset,          /* for error offset */
  NULL);                 /* use default compile context */

/* Compilation failed: print the error message and exit. */
if (re == NULL)
  {
  PCRE2_UCHAR buffer[256];
  pcre2_get_error_message(errornumber, buffer, sizeof(buffer));
  printf("PCRE2 compilation failed at offset %d: %s\n", (int)erroroffset,buffer);
  return 1;
  }


match_data = pcre2_match_data_create_from_pattern(re, NULL);

rc = pcre2_match(
  re,
  subject,              /* the subject string */
  subject_length,       /* the length of the subject */
  0,                    /* start at offset 0 in the subject */
  0,                    /* default options */
  match_data,           /* block for storing the result */
  NULL);

if (rc < 0)
  {
  switch(rc)
    {
    case PCRE2_ERROR_NOMATCH: //printf("No match\n"); //
    pcre2_match_data_free(match_data);
    pcre2_code_free(re);
    Found = 0;
    return Found;
    //  break;
    /*
    Handle other special cases if you like
    */
    default: printf("Matching error %d\n", rc); //break;
    }
  pcre2_match_data_free(match_data);   /* Release memory used for the match */
  pcre2_code_free(re);
  Found = 0;                /* data and the compiled pattern. */
  return Found;
  }


if (Debug){
ovector = pcre2_get_ovector_pointer(match_data);
printf("Match succeeded at offset %d\n", (int)ovector[0]);

if (rc == 0)
  printf("ovector was not big enough for all the captured substrings\n");


if (ovector[0] > ovector[1])
  {
  printf("\\K was used in an assertion to set the match start after its end.\n"
    "From end to start the match was: %.*s\n", (int)(ovector[0] - ovector[1]),
      (char *)(subject + ovector[1]));
  printf("Run abandoned\n");
  pcre2_match_data_free(match_data);
  pcre2_code_free(re);
  return 0;
}

for (i = 0; i < rc; i++)
  {
  PCRE2_SPTR substring_start = subject + ovector[2*i];
  size_t substring_length = ovector[2*i+1] - ovector[2*i];
  printf("%2d: %.*s\n", i, (int)substring_length, (char *)substring_start);
  }
}

else{
  if(rc > 0){
    Found = true;

    } 
} 
pcre2_match_data_free(match_data);
pcre2_code_free(re);
return Found;

}

Install PCRE using:

wget https://ftp.pcre.org/pub/pcre/pcre2-10.31.zip
make 
sudo make install 
sudo ldconfig

Compile using :

gcc foo.c -lpcre2-8 -o foo

Check my answer for more details.